Range Rover Unveils a $295,000 Supercharged Coupe

(Bloomberg) -- Land Rover unveiled something rather unexpected for the famously off-road brand: a coupe.

The Range Rover SV Coupe displayed on Tuesday at the Geneva Auto Show is a two-door SUV that costs $295,000 and will be limited to 999 units made. Land Rover, a unit of Tata Motors Ltd.'s Jaguar Land Rover, is calling it the world's first full-size luxury SUV Coupe.  

It's also the fastest Range Rover you can buy, meant to tap into the lucrative market for high-end, limited-edition sports cars. Until now, Land Rover hasn't had one. The company is betting that specialized vehicles such as this one, which have higher margins than standard-issue SUVs, will help boost excitement for the 48-year-old Range Rover brand.

“This is a meticulously honed vehicle that's designed for SV clients who love driving,” says Mark Stanton, Land Rover's Special Vehicle Operations director.

The SV Coupe comes with a 5.0-liter supercharged V8 engine that gets 557 horsepower and can hit 60 miles per hour in five seconds. Top speed is 165mph.

It has a low roof line, a long, tapered rear end, and a new, two-part grille with metallic rear mesh overlaid with bright chrome front mesh and a satin silver surround. New, two-tone colorways and massive, 23-inch wheels from the British brand are meant to make it look even sportier.

Inside, the SV Coupe has all the trappings of Land Rover wealth, including a panoramic sun roof, quilted leather seats, and three-dimensional wooden inlays of walnut, sycamore, and maple. It will also have Land Rover's exceptional and gigantic new control screen and center console technologies. Range Rover says it will have the towing capacity of a larger SUV; with the four seats and coupe configuration, it's more likely that the extent of its prowess will be limited to the wilds of, say, Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, Calif. 

The Range Rover SV Coupe will be built by hand in Warwickshire, U.K. Deliveries will start in late 2018.

To contact the author of this story: Hannah Elliott in New York at helliott8@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Lisa Fleisher at lfleisher2@bloomberg.net, Timothy Coulter

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