Evoque and Discovery Sport to Lead Electric Charge

The new Range Rover Evoque and Discovery Sport, set to debut sometime around 2024, will set the bar for Land Rover’s new electrification and autonomy technology.

JLR documents seen by UK publication Autocar state that the Evoque will come first in 2024, followed quickly by the Disco Sport. They will be built on the Electrified Modular Architecture (EMA), which will be battery-focused. While all of these vehicles will come with battery power, some will have the option of a small internal combustion engine as a range extender.

The EMA platform will have a massive floor-mounted battery pack, or a smaller hybrid-sized battery paired with an internal combustion range extender. The necessary Land Rover all-wheel drive system will have torquey 800-volt electric motors, with about four miles of travel for every kilowatt hour used.

The vehicles will also be highly autonomous, with anything from Level 2 (partial driving automation) to Level 4 (high driving automation) available. They’ll have the ability to network with other cars and the road network and infrastructure, too.

All this electric tech will raise the costs of the cars, and so expect the Disco Sport and Evoque to move a bit (more) upmarket in their third generation. Hopefully this will also help Land Rover to become consistently profitable, a major goal for new CEO Thierry Bollore. He feels that JLR’s reputation for quality costs them 100,000 sales a year, and wants to fix that. The simplicity of the electric platforms will help with that, too.

The larger Land Rover models will be built on Modular Longitudinal Architecture (MLA), a larger platform that’s equal to the D7 platform used on the current full-sized models. While EMA vehicles will be built at Halewood, MLA will be focused at Solihull. This should debut on the coming 2022 Range Rover, and will trickle to the Range Rover Sport, Range Rover Velar, Discovery, and presumably one day Defender as they each get their next model updates.

JLR’s goal by 2030 is to sell half their vehicles on EMA, with MLA taking about 40% and Jaguar vehicles on other EV platforms selling the rest. Where they go now blazes new trails – literally and figuratively – in the 4x4 world.