News : Range Rover L405 keeps on winning

Range Rover L405 (1)

The Range Rover L405 has notched up 10 international awards in the three months since production began. The world’s first aluminium SUV’s most recent honour came from the AUTOBEST group of motoring writers, naming the all-new Range Rover ‘TECHNOBEST 2012’.

Recent awards also include ‘Dream Machine’ from MotorWeek, ‘Luxury Car of the Year’ from both What Car? and Top Gear magazines and ‘Best Cars – Import Category’ from Auto Motor und Sport. The model was also crowned ‘4×4 Category Winner’ in The Sunday Times’ Top 100 Cars 2012, among others.

The Range Rover L405 was launched last October to critical acclaim and is the world’s first aluminium monocoque SUV, which is around 420kg lighter than the outgoing model. The Range Rover is built at Land Rover’s new low-energy Solihull facility and there is already strong demand across global markets.

Land Rover Global Brand Director, John Edwards, commented: ‘We are proud of the recognition the Range Rover is receiving from international motoring organisations and publications. It is a fantastic achievement and a great endorsement for the model, which has only been in production for three months. Its revolutionary lightweight construction is the result of unprecedented investment in technology and engineering which makes it the most refined, most capable Range Rover ever. It is enormously satisfying to see that international judges, as well as customers, are recognising this too.’

Keith Adams

12 Comments

  1. And lest us not forget the aluminium body build technology was pioneered by Jaguar. I have a 2003 X350 (the factory designation), and it is a superb car. I call it my aircraft fuselage on four wheels ! The light feeling as one drives around our usual twisty B and other back roads is uncanny. The Z-bends on the minor roads descending into the Rhine and Rhone gorges give no worries at all.

  2. #3. I think you will find that in fact it was Audi with the A8 who produced the first automotive alloy monocoque. Jaguar were certainly the first British manufacturer to use the techniques , but it has not been without its problems of paint durability as the JEC magazine testifies at fairly regular intervals

  3. #4 The A8 uses ally panels bolted to an ally spaceframe. X350 uses riveted stressed panels to form a true monocoque, so #3 was correct.

    Either way, ally isn’t all it’s cracked (no pun) up to be. It’s a 1/3 as heavy as steel but only a 1/3 as stiff, so you need the same mass of ally as you do steel to get the same compressive or tensile stiffness.

    The only way you gain is to give each section a very large diameter & thin tube walls (hence mountain bike tubes) as bending stiffness is a quartic relation to diameter.

    Furthermore, ally’s fatigue capabilities aren’t as good as steel’s either. In many ways, steel is still THE material to use.

  4. I see on the latest JD quality and dependability USA results Land Rover was dead last and Jaguar not much better. I wonder how The L405 will fear in a year or so ??

  5. Actually I think the D-Type/XKSS beat the NSX and the A8 to an alluminium monocogue by quiet some margin. If I dig about there is proabbly an even earlier alloy monocoque

  6. @7, the americans can break anything.. and they do seem to have really rubbish petrol (I know PON and RON are differnt) the old XK used to have horendous tappet guide probelms in the US but virtually never over here. Somthing I can only ascribe to a differance in the exhaust temps (it’s usally the exhaust tappet guide that fails). But I digress, engines that are no trouble here often fail over there!

  7. And of course there was the ‘Production’ version of the E-type, known as the leightweight.. for homolgation purposes the steel cars were the ‘prototypes’.. Even jaguar could play at being Ferrari!

  8. Still the best luxury SUV by far – nothing to my mind will ever top the Rangie – just hope the build quality doesn’t let it down.

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