Our spies have been snooping inside the new 2012 Range Rover – and this photo is the best look yet at the new Rangie’s cabin.
It’s a plush, leather lined affair with hide covering the majority of the dashboard, and polished wood sitting alongside aluminium on the central stack.
What’s the new 2012 Range Rover’s cabin like?
Quite different, judging by this first photograph inside. For starters, we can see that Land Rover is adopting the Jaguar Drive selector rotary gearchange first pioneered on the Jag XF.
Here the round dial appears to be swathed in leather for a more upmarket feel than the ribbed aluminium design on Jaguar saloons. It rotates around, as usual, between P, R, N, D and S for Sport mode, controlling the eight-speed ZF transmission.
Behind the rotary gearchange is a polished metal Range Rover stamp, followed by what looks like a development of the Terrain Response system to set up the new Range Rover’s off-road functions and electronics to cope with different road surfaces. At the back of the central stack is a polished metal lever to actuate the parking brake.
What else can we see in the new Range Rover’s interior?
A whopping great big multimedia screen dominates the dashboard – it will control most of the Range Rover’s electronic systems, climate control and in-car entertainment. There’s a bank of soft keys just visible down the right-hand side to select different menus and to flick between functions such as phone or navigation.
Three round dials on the centre console will run the basic temperature and fan speed; look closely and you’ll see a heated front screen, a legacy of Land Rover’s ownership by Ford.
Range Rover L405: in brief
The new Range Rover is important for Land Rover; it premieres the company’s new Premium Lightweight Architecture (PLA), which will also underpin the next Range Rover Sport due in 2013.
This will trim plenty of weight from the car, but also allows for more modularity and it’ll be an incredibly stiff architecture. Engines will include the supercharged 5.0-litre V8 petrol and a rebooted 4.4-litre V8 turbodiesel – but, increasingly, downsizing is flavour of the month, with the petrol and derv V6s likely to make up more of the sales mix.
You’ll have to wait for the hybrid Range Rover, though; we hear it won’t be seen before 2014.