The 2020 Range Rover Velar SVAutobiography Is a $100,000 Super SUV

This is a 2020 Range Rover Velar SV Autobiography Dynamic Edition, which is an enormous amount of words. But it's also the high performance version of the Range Rover Velar with a supercharged V8 that makes 550 horsepower and a sticker price of just under $100,000. And today I'm going to review it. First, a little overview. Land Rover now makes seven SUVs. Seven. But the Velar might just be my favorite. Think of it as the sportier, better looking alternative to the more practical Range Rover Sport. This is basically Land Rover's version of one of those coupe SUVs like the BMW X6 or the Mercedes-Benz GLE Coupe, except that this is far, far better looking. The entry level Velar starts around $57,000, but you don't really want that one. It comes with a pretty mild four-cylinder that makes around 250 horsepower. Most people upgrade to the supercharged V6, which has about 340 horsepower and sends the Velar from zero to 60 in 6.1 seconds, which is respectable. But if you still want more speed, there's this. This is the Velar SV Autobiography Dynamic Edition, which is just a ridiculously stupid long name. BMW has M, Mercedes has AMG, Land Rover has SV Autobiography Dynamic Edition. But if you can get past the name, this car really delivers. Like I said, supercharged V8, 550 horsepower, 500 pound feet of torque, zero to 60 in 4.3 seconds. This is basically the ultimate performer in the Land Rover lineup right now. It has about the same numbers as the Range Rover Sport SVR. Of course, it's also expensive. This version of the Velar starts around $91,000. This one has a sticker price of around $95,000, but you can easily get over $100,000 with options. And today, I'm going to find out if it's worth it. First, I'm going to take you on a tour of this Velar and show you all of its interesting quirks and features. Then I'm going to get it out on the road and drive it, and then I'll give it a Doug score. All right, I'm going to start the quirks and features of the Super Velar with getting in. And that means starting with the door handles. Now, right now, you can see they're flush up against the doors to preserve this clean look on the side of the car. That means the doors are locked. Now, when you unlock the doors, press the button on the key fob, they pop out. Take a look. You can see they pop right out. And they do that so that then you can grab the door handles and actually pull on them and get inside the car. When you go and lock the doors again, of course, they go right back into the door so they have that flush look. And you don't need to press the button on the key fob. You can walk up to the car with the key fob in your pocket and just press this little button on the door handle. Then they will pop out, and then you can pull them and open them up. Now, of course, given this door handle situation, you might wonder how exactly you enter this vehicle if the battery is dead and you can't open these door handles. Well, it turns out on the driver's side, there's a little emergency keyhole inside the door handle once it is extended out. But then I'm wondering how exactly do you access that little keyhole if the battery is dead or the door handle breaks and you can't get it to extend out? How do you get into the door handle? I'm sure there's some process, but it seems like it would be confusing or maybe difficult. If you have one of these, you better just hope your door handles work. And next up, we move into the Velar, where the next interesting thing happens when you start it up. The moment you press the starter button to turn it on, the gear lever rises up out of the center console so that it can be used, and then you just twist it to get it into gear. When you turn off the car, the gear lever retracts back into the center console to preserve a flatter look in here and so that it's only raised up when you're about to use it. And next up, another interesting item in the center console area near the gear lever, you can see there's an exposed cup holder in here and a little square storage area. And there's also a Land Rover logo. It turns out if you press the Land Rover logo, this little lid retracts and a hidden cup holder appears. So that's not just a Land Rover logo, it's actually a functional button that reveals a secret cup holder. And next up, speaking of noteworthy controls in this car, let's move on to the obvious one. That would be the two screens. There are two center screens. You have sort of a smaller one on top and then a larger one on the bottom with these two little circles in it, which seem odd. So let's start with that one. That lower screen adjusts a lot of different car functions, and I'm going to start with the climate controls. You can see, you can use this lower screen to adjust where the air comes out from the vents. That's pretty standard, nothing unusual there. The cool part is what happens with the little circles. All right, right now, the temperature of the air is inside the circles, and you can twist the circle itself to change the temperature on the driver or passenger side. That's pretty cool, but there's more to it. If you press this little fan button, suddenly the circle becomes the fan speed, and then you can twist the circle to adjust the fan speed, how quickly the air is coming out of the vents. And of course, after a while, it goes back to being the temperature control. But there's still more. You can press these little dials on the screen. It's also a button, and when you press it, suddenly it's adjusting your seat climate control. So then you can twist the dial to turn on your heated seat if you turn it to the right, or if you turn to the left, it will turn on your cooled seat. And when you're done, you can press it again, and it goes back to being your climate control temperature dial. So this little dial in the center screen serves multiple functions depending on what you need it for, which is kind of nifty. And next up on this lower screen, there's also a tab marked seats. You go to that, there's more seat options, including you can turn on the massaging seats, because of course you can when you spend this money for a luxury car. The next tab will turn on your radio and allow you to change your radio station, your preset, your media, that sort of thing. But to me, the best tab on this lower screen is the vehicle tab, because it allows you to choose various different drive modes, or as Land Rover calls them, programs. And you can choose like eco and various different off-road modes, including sand for when you take your Velar on the sand dunes. But you can also choose a dynamic mode, since this is the high performance version, the dynamic mode for high performance road driving. And once you're in dynamic mode, you can push on this little helmet to the right, and then the upper screen changes and shows you various configurable settings in dynamic mode, like your steering, your acceleration, your suspension. You can configure all of that to make the car more or less dynamic depending on your preferences. Now, one other cool thing you can do on this vehicle tab on the lower screen, you can turn on the sport exhaust. Press this button and it turns on. And with this big V8, this thing sounds pretty good with the sport exhaust. Take a listen. And next up, we move on to the upper screen. Now, this is a fairly standard Land Rover infotainment system. It's in other Land Rover models, even if they don't have the configurable lower screen setup. So it's pretty familiar if you've been in modern Land Rover models. But there are still two quirks worth mentioning. One is the camera situation. You put the car in reverse or turn on the camera and you can see it appears in the upper screen very, very small. That's really a disappointment considering that the lower screen is so much larger. And combined with the gauge cluster screen, there's just so much screen in here. You'd think they could make the camera system a little easier to see. It's really sad that it's kind of jammed into the upper screen so small. And the other interesting thing about the upper screen is that you can adjust its angle, but not by just touching the screen. Instead, you go into settings and tap the screen angle setting and it changes right before your eyes electronically. This seems a little excessive. I suspect this is the kind of thing that's going to break and maybe is unnecessary. I don't mind just pushing the screen to tilt it a little bit, but that's how you change the screen angle in a Velar. And one other interesting quirk of that upper screen, if you scroll to the right on the home screen, you can come to an icon called vehicle dimensions. You press it and it literally shows you your vehicle dimensions. I guess if you're wondering how tall you are, how long your vehicle is, well, you can find that out while you're driving along. I think the thinking here is that this car has different suspension heights based on what mode you're in, and you might be worried you're too tall to fit somewhere if you're in the highest height. So it actually tells you how tall you are in whatever height you're currently in. But still, I've never before seen a car that shows you its dimensions on its infotainment screen. And finally, we move on to the gauge cluster screen. This isn't as notable as it was when the Velar first came out a couple of years ago. Everybody is using gauge cluster screens now. But the Velar has one too, and you can see it has your speedometer and your map right in the center, and you can use it to see various other different items, your radio, your settings, that sort of thing. To me, the most interesting thing about the gauge cluster screen is how you adjust it. You have little buttons on the steering wheel that are electronic, and they're dynamic. They change their display depending on what menu you're on in the gauge cluster screen. You can see I change menus, and what's displayed on these buttons actually changes to correspond with what's being shown on the screen. That is a pretty cool feature, and it allows Land Rover to make the steering wheel less cluttered because you can have one button that does multiple things rather than sticking multiple buttons on the steering wheel and making it look too busy and too difficult. And next up, moving on from the screens to discuss some other interior stuff. One item I absolutely love in here is the seats. I love how they look. I love the stitching. I love the white accents. I think they look really, really beautiful, totally in place in a car with this kind of price tag. But on the other hand, something a little disappointing is the door panel. The panel itself is fine, but the place where it transitions to the pillar next to the seat is not really all that nice looking. For one thing, that pillar looks like cheap plastic, but also nothing sort of continues from the door panel to that pillar, and it just doesn't look finished. It doesn't look like what you'd expect on a car at this price point. And finally, one other interesting interior item. You can press this little button in the ceiling to electronically retract the little cover over the sunroof. That's not all that surprising. Virtually all cars have something like that. The interesting thing here, though, is if you have the cover open and then you park the car, turn it off, walk away, the cover will automatically go back on and cover the interior so it doesn't get too hot while you're away. They figure you must have forgotten to cover it. Obviously, you want your interior to stay as cool as possible, and so that piece automatically covers the interior when the car is off. Now, if you had that cover open, when you get back in the car and turn it on, the cover automatically reopens to go back to the position where you had it. That is pretty clever thinking. And next up, we move on to the backseat in the Velar. There are a few things worth mentioning back here. For one thing, rear seat room. I'm going to start with legroom, which isn't really all that generous. You can sit back here with the front seats pretty far back, but it's not tremendously comfortable. This isn't really a huge SUV. But the bright spot back here is headroom. There's a lot of it. Unlike those coupe-y SUVs that slope back like the GLE coupe and the X6, the Velar has a flat roofline, and that means more rear seat headroom. I can sit all the way up and I have no problem with my head and the ceiling. There's ample headroom back here, which is nice. But there's also more to talk about back here. For one thing, the rear seat climate controls, which operate quite a bit like the front ones, meaning that you have the same dials back here. You twist them and that will change your rear seat climate control temperature, which is a pretty nifty little trick for the back seats. And again, if you push the dial, now you're controlling your rear seat climate control. You turn it to the right and you can turn on your heated seat to various different levels. Although it's worth noting there is no rear cooled seat back here. You only have heated. Now, also in the rear seat climate control area, you have a little electronic pad in the middle that allows you to direct where you want the air to come out and to adjust your fan speed. You do that in that little pad rather than using the dial. And next up, another cool feature back here, you have a rear seat back recliner. You can see the rear seat back will electronically go forward and backwards depending on where you want it for your most possible comfort. The strange thing about this recliner is the button you use to operate it, which just looks terrible. This looks like a 1990s Ford window switch you would have seen in a base model Escort. And I actually think that's where it came from. But either way, you won't really be seeing that button when you press it to recline the seat forward or backward. So I guess it doesn't really matter all that much. And next, we move on to the cargo area in the Velar, where there are a couple of interesting items worth note. One is under the floor back here, you have the spare tire, which is the world's most annoying spare tire, bright red. I swear they paint it in this color primarily just to shame you. You walk up to your car and you think, oh, it's so ugly. I'm so embarrassed. I have to take it into the dealership and get this fixed. And so that's why they do that. Obviously also to remind you that you're on a spare tire and so you shouldn't go too fast before you get the real one put back on. Now, the other interesting thing back here is the cargo volume, which is surprisingly generous for a vehicle like this. Far better than those slopey roof coupe back SUVs. In fact, the Velar has almost 20% more cargo space than a BMW X6 with the rear seats folded down. That's another advantage of this design with the flat roof instead of that coupe-y little curved look that the other ones have. And speaking of the BMW X6, let's discuss styling for a second, because this is a really nice looking SUV. Really well done, beautiful lines, perfectly proportioned. It looks fantastic. I remember when they first announced the Velar and I was thinking, do we really need another Land Rover or Range Rover model that size at that price point? It seems like the lineup is just too full. And then they showed the pictures and it was like, yeah, yeah, that'll do. We can handle that one. And in real life, it looks just as good as in the photos, especially with the big wheels and the good trim looking like this one. In fact, it looks way better than those slant back coupe SUVs like the X6 and the GLE coupe. And it's harder to create a vehicle like this. An X6, you just take the front end of the X5 and change only half the car. With this thing, you have to change everything. It's a totally new look, but that investment is worth it. It ends up looking much, much better than those half-hearted coupe back SUVs. This is one of the best looking SUVs on sale. And yet they have to saddle this beautiful SUV with a ridiculous name, SV Autobiography Dynamic Edition. Why? Why not just call it the SVR? We already know what that is. You use it on other vehicles. SV Autobiography Dynamic Edition. Are you trying to make your name as long as possible so people will make fun of you? It's just stupid. And finally, we move under the hood. Like I said, supercharged V8, 550 horsepower, 500 pound feet of torque. Although the thing that surprises me most is that there's no plastic cover over everything under here, which is very unusual for a modern luxury vehicle. Everything is exposed, old school style, so you can work on your velar. Now it's worth noting that this is not the most powerful model in Land Rover's portfolio. That would be the Range Rover Sport SVR, which has 575 horsepower. But the Sport SVR has a starting price that's about $25,000 more than this velar. And the numbers are the same. It's a bigger vehicle. And so zero to 60 is the same 4.3 seconds as this. And this is better looking. So it's cheaper. It's just as fast. And it has only a little bit less power. To me, this kind of is the ultimate performance vehicle in the Land Rover lineup. And so those are the quirks and features of the Range Rover Velar SV Autobiography Dynamic Edition. Now it's time to get it out on the road and see how it drives. All right, driving the velar. It sounds pretty good. When I showed you the exhaust clip earlier, this is one of those cars that doesn't let you rev past 4,000 RPM when you're stopped. But when you're moving, you can get it up there, of course. And oh, does it sound nice when you do. Now, I first reviewed the velar about two and a half years ago when it first came out in the DC area. It was the hottest new car. And there haven't been that many changes to the velar lineup since then until now we finally have a V8 version. And not just any V8, 550 horsepower. I mean, this thing, this is the boss. Oh, yeah. One of the things I absolutely loved about the velar back then was how light on its feet it felt. And I'm happy to report that this car still feels like that. Now, the one I drove in that review was the velar R Dynamic, which was the sportiest version they had at the time. Obviously, this is now a sportier version. The steering and handling still feels about the same. Still very light on its feet. Very good for an SUV. Tremendously poised, really sharp steering, really good handling. About as good as you'll find in any modern SUV. Just the big benefit now is you also have more horsepower to back that up. So instead of zero to 60 in six point something or five point something seconds, you're not doing it in four three. You now have real performance car acceleration to match this vehicle's real performance car handling. Now, Land Rover fans diehards will watch this and just cringe at this vehicle. You know, 22 inch wheels. It's all about on road performance and styling as opposed to go anywhere sort of functional design. And keep in mind, I own a Land Rover Defender. I love that boxy off road capable vehicle. But if you want a luxury performance SUV. Oh, yeah. This is incredibly compelling. It's far more attractive than an X6 M or a GLE 63 AMG. This is a really impressive vehicle. It makes a really good case for itself. Now, in some areas, I will say the Velar is a little deficient. The biggest is undoubtedly its center screen situation. Mercedes Benz is just better. The new BMW stuff is just better. These screens are a little bit laggy. When you touch them, you have to push them hard, not just quickly like a cell phone. They take a little time to go between screens. They're just not the best in the business. The funny thing is, when I reviewed this car two years ago, two and a half years ago, they were cutting edge. And it's amazing to me now to get in here and be like, this isn't really the latest and greatest. It has changed pretty quickly. Overall, I have very few negative things to say about this. If I was getting a new Land Rover and had a big budget, I would probably get one of these. Yeah, the Range Rover is nice, but it's big money and nowhere near as dynamically enjoyable as this car. The Range Rover Sport is more practical. It offers a third row, but this is much better looking and more fun to drive. This is it. Oh, that steering and that acceleration. And so that's the 2020 Range Rover Velar SV Autobiography Dynamic Edition. This is a great SUV. And pending the arrival of the new Defender, it might just be my favorite Land Rover. It's gorgeous. It's fun to drive. It's well-equipped. And it's not even really all that expensive when you consider that a Range Rover SVR with the same numbers is about $30,000 more. This thing is excellent and it's a great alternative to those weird looking coupe SUV things. And now it's time to give this Velar a Doug score. Starting with the weekend categories and styling, the Velar is truly gorgeous for an SUV and it gets a 7 out of 10. Acceleration does 0 to 60 in 4.3 seconds, which gives it a 7 out of 10. Handling is spry, really impressive for an SUV like this, and it gets a 6 out of 10. Fun factor is good. This is ultimately a reasonable, restrained luxury vehicle, so it's not insanely fun, but it's still very enjoyable and it gets a 6 out of 10. Cool factor is strong, especially for this, the top model, and it gets a 6 out of 10 for a total weekend score of 32 out of 50. Next up are the daily categories and features. The Velar is well equipped, though not quite on the level of some more modern luxury SUVs, and it gets an 8 out of 10. Comfort is fine. The ride is a bit harsh, especially in dynamic mode, but it's nice enough and it gets a 6 out of 10. Quality is a mixed bag. The interior is generally really nice, though there are some deficiencies. But the real issue is reliability, where Land Rover's track record hasn't been amazing to say the least, it gets a 6 out of 10. Practicality is normal for a car like this, and it gets an 8 out of 10. Value is mixed. It's a good value for its performance and amenities, but it's still a $100,000 luxury SUV, it's going to depreciate fast, and it gets a 6 out of 10 for a total daily score of 34 out of 50. Added up, and the dug score is 66 out of 100, which places it here against some rivals. I've driven basically everything in this category at this point, and the Velar is really, really competitive. Basically, the only vehicles that score better cost way more money. One exception is the BMW X3M competition, which ties the Velar. The Velar is better looking and has better tech, but the BMW is faster and doesn't have to contend with Land Rover's reliability record. The Tesla Model Y Performance also beats out the Velar. The Tesla is definitely the more sensible purchase, but the Velar is far more attractive, it drives better, and oh, that sound.