rivals – All about car

Tuesday, 8.43am, Milton Keynes Coachway: Britain’s latest and most powerful electric car charging station, installed by Ionity in a corner of Milton Keynes’ park and ride bus station, consists of four charging bays. And right now, it just so happens that we’ve got four EVs with batteries to brim ahead of an Autocar group test with a twist. What luck. Pretty soon, the brand-new Mercedes-Benz EQC that I’ve brought along – the newest boy in the electric luxury car class – is joined by fairly recent arrival the Audi E-tron, electric SUV old boy the Tesla Model X and current class favourite the Jaguar I-Pace. With the hum of flowing current and cooling fans that duly ensues, it’s as if we’re in some giant, open-air computer server cupboard. Plugged in and topped up, the Tesla makes the grandest promises – 287 miles of battery range advertised, compared with only 226 miles for both the Audi and Jaguar, joint least. Will any of those advertised range figures be enough to complete our planned convoy road trip to the Severn Estuary and back, though? And over the next 250 miles and 36 hours, which of these cars will prove itself to be the most practical, usable and all-round convincing electric luxury car in a newly metal-swollen niche of the market? Today, we’re heading to the Severn Bridge to overnight, via some dependably good roads for photography and driving, as a test of real-world, mixed-route energy efficiency and range. Tomorrow, we’ll turn around and head back, testing the current reliability and scope of the UK’s rapid charging network, as well as the various respective capacities of our cars to access and navigate it. Much as it would make life simple to say, here and now, that the first car to return to the point from which we’re about to depart will be our winner, I suspect the truth won’t be quite so straightforward. 10:52am, A34, near Oxford: It’s a good car, this Mercedes – quicker and more engaging than I reckoned a few months ago after driving it abroad – and yet classy, comfortable, spacious, rich and quiet. Right now, it’s wafting serenely around the Oxford bypass as part of a four-car convoy that few will hear coming, but that plenty will notice passing. Not that those onlookers will all have nice things to say about the sight of the Mercedes. Photographer Olgun Kordal had it about right when he described the EQC as looking like a GLC “that has been left in the oven too long”. Shame. The Audi is considerably smarter to my eyes, the Tesla marginally less so, with its bulbous proportions and its slightly incongruous sloping roofline. But it’s the Jaguar that’s the bedroom wall material. Chucking it in among its direct competition only serves to underline what a stellar job was done on the I-Pace’s design and how much more interesting an object it is to behold than pretty much anything else like it. Well, can’t sit here and admire it all day. As we peel off west towards Wantage, onto smaller and more testing A- and B-roads, I flag down a colleague and swap into the I-Pace. And how great to be reminded what a treat this car is to drive. As well as feeling a good deal lighter, tauter handling, more immediate and more agile than the EQC, it’s got wonderfully tactile and supremely well-weighted steering. And it rides uncommonly well, with a decent sense of cushioning even on 22in rims, and a present but entirely tolerable amount of road noise. For performance, it’s right up there: the EQC’s torque might allow it to pick up more briskly from roundabout pace, but the Jaguar’s almost as quick from low speed. Holding up on some local country roads we know well gives a chance to hop into all four cars for back-to-back comparisons of the driving experiences they offer – as well as to take some action photographs. My suspicions about the Audi E-tron prove correct: it weighs marginally less than the EQC and yet it feels bigger and heavier because its softer all-corner air suspension and steering are plainly tuned more for comfort and isolation than for handling dynamism. The E-tron is very good at smothering bumps, filtering surface coarseness and making you relax at the wheel. As everyone in the road trip party agrees, though, it’s not nearly as engaging as either the EQC or the I-Pace. Ask the same party to choose the car they’d drive every day, and without a second thought for where or how, and the result’s equally unanimous: Jaguar, please. 3:32, westbound M4, near Swindon: Our little electric caravan is doing just fine, although since it hasn’t yet been running for a full hundred miles, so it should be. After a few hours, for photos and a bite of lunch, we’re on our way west, taking in our first few motorway miles of the trip and homing in on our final destination for the day: the Alveston House Hotel just north of Bristol. My first few miles of the trip in the Tesla have just been followed by another few miles in the Audi – and you couldn’t have picked a pair
Origin: Electric SUV megatest: Mercedes EQC vs luxury rivals

Warning: the comparison test you’re about to read involves a Land Rover. It therefore includes obligatory photographs taken off-road, in a Welsh limestone quarry known well to staffers of this magazine, for which the Autocar road test desk and photography department send their apologies. In this line of work, some visual clichés are simply too well-worn to resist. This particular cliché should certainly be acknowledged for what it is, though: a bit of artistic licence. Because while the second-generation Range Rover Evoque may be all-new and all-important for its creator, it’s every inch a compact SUV and not an ‘off-roader’. As such cars go, the Evoque is capable, rugged and versatile, but it’s very much an everyday road car. You know this. We know this. Yet while picturing it abandoned on double yellows, astride the kerb and hazards ablaze outside a primary school might have been more appropriate, such a photograph wouldn’t have looked half as pretty or been as much fun in the making. Our story so far on the new Evoque has brought us through early ride-along and international press launch and, very recently, UK first drive. Now, though, a chance to find out just how good this rather important Evoque is judged against its toughest opponents, two of which we are about to describe and rate it in specific reference to: the second-generation Audi Q3, which – roll up, roll up – is also new this year, and the Volvo XC40, which is Autocar’s incumbent compact SUV class favourite and without which these proceedings would otherwise be largely irrelevant. But, well, yes, you’re right: as it happens, there are four cars in the photograph you’ve been glancing at for the past minute or so. For reasons of general usefulness, fairness and accuracy, however, what you’re about to read will actually be a slightly truncated three-car comparison with an addendum on an interesting if unconventional new Lexus – the UX 250h – which, as it turns out, isn’t really a compact SUV at all. It might, though, provide welcome cause to wonder whether you need such a car quite as much as you thought you did. Modern compact SUVs remain suspiciously on-trend. Unlike some of my colleagues, I don’t have a problem with this. To me, they are increasingly popular for good reasons and are being bought by people who, had they been in the market 25 years ago, would have likely ended up in a biggish, volume-branded family saloon or estate mostly out of a lack of choice. We all get to that stage in our lives when a five-door hatchback simply isn’t enough car for us any more. The modern buyer who has reached that point can still buy a biggish, volume-branded family saloon or estate, of course. But why would they when they can have something that looks more stylish and ‘aspirational’ on the driveway; that has greater convenience, versatility and comfort about it; that’s smaller, and feels safer, than a biggish saloon and is easier to get into and see out of and park; and, perhaps most importantly, that has been made so temptingly affordable by the modern finance methods on which the car business is so squarely built in 2019? In the absence of other motivating factors, they clearly wouldn’t. That’s how a company such as Land Rover can become an increasingly well-established global car industry player – and the Evoque can outsell the Ford Mondeo across Europe for two years out of the past five, with every chance now of accelerating away from the old-guarder for good. This Evoque is pretty much the same size as the original version but for a few millimetres here and there. Opinions differ on exactly how new the ‘PTA’ model platform under the car really is, but it’s new enough to have accommodated a longer wheelbase and better on-board practicality, as well as mixed-metal construction and a whole family of 48V mild-hybrid powertrains. Sounds pretty new to me. The resulting car, in likely big-selling 2.0-litre, 178bhp diesel ‘D180 AWD’ form, remains a good 150kg heavier than the average weight of the rest of the cars in this test and is taller and less aerodynamic than most. And yet that mild-hybrid tech and nine-speed automatic gearbox allows it to get within 10% of matching the real-world cruising fuel economy of the most economical car here – which is the Audi, incidentally, which returns a typical 46mpg on a mix of UK motorway and A-road. Both the Q3 40 TDI quattro S tronic and XC40 D4 AWD automatic match the Land Rover for driven wheels and transmission spec, and both beat the Brit for peak power. But neither offers quite the same mild-hybrid technology, and neither has quite as much torque. Torque is important in cars like this, as I’m sure you won’t need telling – but we’ll come back to that. In order to keep the price points close, we elected to test the Evoque in lower-mid-range S-badged trim, knowing that, being a Range Rover, it’s a car that gets a bit prohibitively expensive in the dressier upper trim
Origin: SUV showdown: Range Rover Evoque vs major rivals