• Land Rover has begun a waitlist for its new Range Rover Electric in selected markets.
• Little is known about the capabilities of the new luxury EV, but Land Rover has filed more patents than ever before for the vehicle.
• Pre-orders for the Range Rover Electric begin next year.

In 2021 Jaguar Land Rover, like many other luxury carmakers at the time, announced its intention of embracing electrification of its fleet. To that end, new Jaguar vehicles could be fully electric by 2025 and Land Rover would make 60 percent of its cars electric by 2030.

Regarding the latter division of the company, that vision appears to be taking shape, as the Range Rover Electric has now received waitlist status in selected regions. Land Rover announced the milestone earlier this week, with a fully electric Range Rover expected sometime next year.

Also landing early next year will be pre-orders for the new luxury all-electric SUV.

“New Range Rover Electric will be designed, engineered and built in the United Kingdom, on the flexible Modular Longitudinal Architecture (MLA) in Solihull, alongside existing mild and plug-in hybrid Range Rover vehicles. For the first time, batteries and EDUs will be built and assembled at JLR’s new Electric Propulsion Manufacturing Centre in Wolverhampton, United Kingdom, as Range Rover electrifies ahead of its 2039 net-zero carbon ambition,” Land Rover noted in a press release for the new vehicle.

It added that prototypes are also undergoing rigorous testing at the moment, with this new vehcile potentially carrying the honour of featuring the most filed patents by Land Rover upon its completion.

With little known about the technical specifications, or indeed the electric drivetrain that will power the vehicle, it is at least clear that Land Rover has placed a sizeable investment into the research and development of this car.

“After a year of virtual development spanning front-end robustness, multi-body systems analysis that considers the demand on the chassis, and virtual wading at up to 50km/h, the first physical vehicles have been built. Global on-road testing has started, from Sweden to Dubai, in temperatures ranging from -40C to +50C,” it highlighted.

“The global physical testing programme has been adapted for Range Rover’s first fully electric vehicle to ensure robustness of the electric drive system, including its underfloor, battery durability, chassis integrity and vehicle dynamics tests for thermal derating,” it added.

With the new Defender 90 garnering many fans in South Africa judging by how many are on our roads, the all-electric Range Rover should also be a hit, although we’ll need to see what starting prices will be for an already expensive model of vehicle.