Range Rover Velar Gets Big Update for 2024

The Range Rover Velar has major updates for 2024, taking the reductionist philosophy that underpins the design of the new Range Rover and Range Rover Sport, and combining it with the Velar’s avante-garde design.

The Velar began the Range Rover line’s more artistic and reductionist shift when it came out in 2017, taking the themes from the 2011 Range Rover Evoque to new levels. It was called the “avante-garde” Range Rover, and it pulled its name from Land Rover’s history books, where the word Velar originally referred to the 1969 prototypes of the Range Rover Classic...itself a design icon once enshrined in The Louvre.

Technically, this update falls somewhere in between a facelift and an all-new vehicle. Unlike the Range Rover and Range Rover Sport, which pioneered JLR’s new Modular Longitudinal Architecture platform, the Velar remains on the D7 platform that it shares with Discovery and Defender. The changes are in the lights, bumpers, and the interior – with the interior being the largest change.

The lights have changed somewhat, coming in line with the new Range Rover look. The nested light aesthetic that dates back to the 2003 Range Rover and Discovery Series II has now been reduced to a thin, bold line in the corner of the light, with the grille-to-light ratio more in line with the updates to the Range Rover. In the rear, the light pattern has been slightly tweaked, though they remain located in the glossy black bar that the Velar debuted.

The major changes are in the interior, where the Velar has taken cues from the new Range Rover aesthetic. The dashboard features a curved, 11.4-inch screen, which is higher up on the dash and designed for greater visibility and less reflectivity. The screen presents the new Pivi Pro7 interactive control system, the latest iteration of the Pivi system that debuted on the Defender in 2020.

Pivi Pro7 creates a buttonless interior -- in fact, it even integrates things that previously had separate controllers, like seat adjustment and audio volume. To mitigate the complaints people usually have about having too many tasks buried in the touchscreen, Land Rover did extensive human testing, making sure that core tasks were easy to accomplish. In fact, they say that 80% of tasks can be done in two taps -- a huge step to returning to the muscle memory simplicity of physical knobs and buttons. Core tasks like seat adjustment, Terrain Response, audio volume, and temperature controls are all in sidebars that are always accessible. There are also shortcuts for media and navigation, cameras, and window defrosters. When you start up the new Velar, a Pre-Drive panel comes up on the screen, presenting the driver with some things you'd commonly turn on at the start of a journey, like defrosters and seat heaters. Then it vanishes, revealing the familiar three-panel Pivi home screen.

You can control this new setup from redesigned seats, which are available in several new colorways -- Cloud, Raven Blue and Deep Garnet. Metallic Varesine Blue and Premium Metallic Zadar Grey are new exterior colors. As always, leather-free interior options are available in the form of Kvadrat wool seats.

In a change from the normal way of launching cars, the new Velar debuted on TikTok. While the platform has been embroiled in some controversy as of late, it still holds massive sway in the luxury space, and the Velar is well positioned in the target demographic of "LuxuryTok." The debut opened up the new Range Rover-focused TikTok channel. The goal is to connect the design-forward Velar to the design and fashion side of high-end TikTok. With the app's algorithm digging users deep into their niches, it's a platform with a lot of potentials to build the Range Rover buyer base.

While this isn't a full update of the Velar -- presumably that'll come in a bit as Land Rover transitions slowly off the D7 platform -- the changes re-align the most stylish and sleek of the four Range Rovers with the new design themes, the last of the four to come around after pioneering a new direction.