True, the first Range Rover Evoque is hardly the world’s smallest car, but that’s an awful lot of extra kit to find room for, never mind teasing out some extra space for back-benchers and luggage. So why stick to exactly the same dimensions and make the task harder? Because Land Rover’s market research established that owners of the original Evoque were adamant that it should not get any bigger. In fact, the new Evoque doesn’t occupy exactly the same volume of space as the old (it’s 1mm longer at 4371mm, 10mm wider at 2100mm, 14mm taller at 1649mm and its wheelbase, which has no effect on the footprint, of course, is 21mm longer at 2681mm). But it’s very close. How, then, did Land Rover set about finding the extra cubic centimetres to accommodate these requirements? The process starts, explains vehicle package manager Christophe Sacré, with ‘a statement of intent’. Which is effectively a list of packaging wants majoring on visibility and internal space. They include preserving the driving position but lowering the steering column so that you’re arranged much as you would be in a Range Rover Sport, improving the visibility of the bonnet’s corners, parking the wipers out of sight, improving visibility around the door and interior mirrors, and maintaining or bettering visibility to the rear. In accommodation terms, the objectives were to preserve the original’s front seat space, increase rear room and enlarge the boot, which also had to look visibly bigger. To understand how all this was achieved, we’re in Jaguar Land Rover’s cave. It’s disappointing as rocky undercrofts go – just an ordinary room in the Gaydon G-Dec technical centre with a large screen at one end, smaller screens to the side and an ageing Evoque seat mounted on a metal podium. The magic has yet to come: it’s 3D and requires the wearing of special glasses or goggles. And goggle you will when you travel through the guts of an Evoque. You can see a sectional slice of its Ingenium engine as if a guillotine had opened it up, you can strip the car to a bare floorpan and swivel it every which way, you can inspect the lie of every hose, wiring conduit and fixing, and superimpose the new Evoque onto the old, in any area you like, to see how they compare spatially. Individual components are coloured, and with the expert pointing and shooting of an electronic gun, you can assemble or disassemble an Evoque piece by piece.
Smaller screens and pairs of goggles, meanwhile, provide a 3D view of the interior as if you were sitting in it, its realism complete enough that it’s easy to find yourself placing something on a virtual seat, letting go and hearing it drop to the floor. So how do they accommodate the demands of that statement of intent? Engineers and designers still use computer-aided design to shape components within a given envelope of space, but when there’s a conflict over real estate, the cave is the place for solutions. “It’s more democratic,” says Sacré. “We use it early on in the process, and we can see many things very quickly.”
These range from the big, such as the locations for battery packs, to the detail of switch placement. Battery pack location, a revised crash structure, improved rear room, the bigger boot and a new system of engine mountings were among the more challenging packaging tasks facing the new Evoque’s creators, as these illustrations demonstrate.Floor
The original 2010 Evoque was based on Ford’s EUCD platform, shared with the Mondeo and Volvo XC60 in the days of the Premier Automotive Group. This forced some compromises that are absent from JLR’s new Premium Transverse Architecture (PTA), explains underfloor package manager Matt Eastough, allowing the release of much of the necessary extra space. “We’re using a new primary structure with a cast alloy front subframe that’s designed to crush,” he says. “Early on, we know we’ve got to fit a plug-in battery, and that influences the body design. Once we’ve found homes for these bigger bits, we can concentrate on different zones.” This Evoque is divided into three zones – “it can be more,” says Eastough – while the original was split into two. The housing of smaller novelties follows, such as the ventilation chimney for the battery pack, all the while accounting for the need to waterproof the car. Despite its greater electrical complexity, this Evoque will wade 100mm deeper, to 600mm.
Driving position
Seeing out of thick-pillared, big-mirrored modern cars is a problem that’s been chipped away at here. Sitting in highly accurate, virtual-reality cockpits for Evoques old and new confirms that wipers really do park out of sight, that you can see more of the roadside through the bottom corners of the windscreen and that you can see (marginally) more of the outside world past the interior and exterior mirrors.
