In the last six months we haven’t received a single enquiry about the Range Rover. On the selector section of the OVERDRIVE show, no one wants to know anything about the Range Rover, probably, because it’s so expensive it will only be accessible to extremely limited people. With the hike in excise and import duties, prices of this flagship SUV have gone up by nearly ` 20 lakhs to around ` 1.9crore. For obvious reasons then the enquiries are non-existent.
Why is the Range Rover that expensive then? I’d assume it started off with environment issues, the Range Rover was just too heavy for its existing engines to keep it relevant amidst increasingly stricter and tighter emission norms. The way around that was to lose weight and the only way for that to happen would be to use lighter materials in the overall construction. Being an SUV with probably the best off-road credentials in the world meant that carbon fibre as an option for external body parts would not be sensible especially if owners went trampling through Borneo’s jungles or leaping off sand dunes in the Middle East.
The next best thing would be to employ aluminum, lots and lots of it. Now aluminum is a tricky metal, it’s light enough to give you the desired results, has the required torsional strength and can provide the stiffness required in more premium cars. It’s less expensive as a material compared to carbon fibre, but, it’s still nearly five times more expensive than conventional steel. And so it is that even the Range Rover is nearly five times more expensive than the average luxury SUV available in the market. That’s simply because almost everything that you can touch and feel as metal in the Range Rover is made of aluminum. There is even more aluminum in places that aren’t easily visible such as the frame, which is entirely made of that material. The Range Rover is the first SUV in the world to have an entirely aluminum frame but don’t expect it to start off a trend.
