Range Rover Evoque Review & Prices

Few small SUVs are quite as desirable as the Range Rover Evoque, with a prestigious badge on the bonnet, stylish looks, practical interior and an efficient plug-in hybrid engine option. Shame it’s rather expensive, though, and the interior is boring to look at.

It’s like a pair of Hunter Chelsea boots, where the full-size Range Rover is like a pair of wellies. You get the same posh badge and most of the performance on a country trail, but it’s easier to live with in town and cheaper to buy, too.

The Evoque’s alternatives all take a different approach to the term SUV, however, such as the stylish Audi Q3, posh Mercedes GLB, hybrid Lexus NX and the sporty BMW X2 - which all prioritise on-road driving manners at the expense of off-road ability. The Evoque, meanwhile, manages to be a great all-rounder to drive.

It looks fantastic, turning heads as if it were a much larger, more expensive car. The big, flared wheel arches, slender lights and shallow windows give the baby Range Rover a lot of road presence, and it might well be the most handsome small SUV on sale at the moment. The bronze-coloured example we tested received a lot of compliments on its styling.

When launched, the Evoque’s cabin earned a lot of praise but the 2023 update spoiled things a touch. It’s not an ugly interior by any means, but it’s just a bit too plain to look at - especially in a dark colour - with big, blank interior surfaces and only a single display in the middle of the dashboard.

That display looks great with crisp graphics, but it’s slow to respond to your inputs compared to the BMW and Mercedes fare, while the climate control menus are a faff to use on the go. Material quality is a bit of let down, with scratchy plastics on the door cards, centre console and dash top. Our test model had a noticeable trim creak when going over humps, too.

Space is a mixed bag, because while there are plenty of storage options around the cabin, there’s a surprising lack of passenger legroom up front and under the seats. Boot capacity is good at 591 litres (measured up to the roof), but the PHEV loses a lot of room to fit the electric gubbins underneath.

You can opt for an Evoque with the aforementioned plug-in hybrid engine, while there’s also a single petrol engine to choose from, alongside two diesel options. None of them are particularly efficient, unless you can keep the PHEV’s battery topped up.

It may be a baby off-roader, but the Evoque is right at home in town. The 11.6-metre turning circle, high seating position and (optional) slew of parking cameras make it easy to manoeuvre, while it’s very refined and comfortable on the motorway. The Evoque can even hold its own on a winding lane, feeling stable and grippy, while it’ll leave every other small SUV in its dust (or mud) on a country trail.

Have a look at new Range Rover Evoque deals on Carwow, or Evoque lease deals instead. There are lots of used Evoques available, as well as other used Land Rover models through our trusted dealer network. Carwow can help you sell your car when the time comes to switch, too.

Starting at around £44,000, the Range Rover Evoque certainly isn’t cheap - costing a bit more than the BMW X2, and a lot more than an entry-level Audi Q3 or Mercedes GLB. You have some posh standard kit with the baby Rangey in ‘S’ trim, including leather upholstery, keyless entry-and-go and a digital driver display.

The Dynamic SE adds 19-inch alloy wheels, more intricate LED headlights, a Meridien sound system, 360-degree cameras, electric boot lid and blind spot assist, while top-spec Autobiography models get 20-inch wheels, a glass roof, extended leather interior and a switchable rear view mirror/camera combo.

More fun to drive on twisty roads than you’d expect and epic off road, but it’s bumpier around town

In town

The Evoque might be the smallest Range Rover you can buy, but it still gives you some of that traditional commanding Land Rover driving position, so you get a great view out over the bonnet, though the windscreen is quite narrow which can take a little time to adjust to. That does little to impact forward visibility though, and you can also see clearly around the sides of the car, which is useful in town.

You get nice big door mirrors, which are great when you’re parking, but less good is the fact that the rear screen is pretty small, so the view out of the back isn’t great. While the seats are comfortable, the Evoque does have a tendency to jiggle around at low speeds over broken roads. It deals with big bumps and dips very well, that being said.

The automatic gearbox is slow to respond when you need a quick burst of acceleration, such as when you’re pulling out of a busy junction, and you can be left floundering. The plug-in hybrid model goes some way to remedy this thanks to the instant shove from its electric motor.

If you spend most of your time driving around town, you can cruise along silently in electric mode in the PHEV. The battery offers up to 39 miles of claimed range, but we only managed about 25 in our testing.

On the motorway

That jittery suspension does smooth out quite a bit when you bring the Evoque up to motorway speed, where you glide along rather nicely. It’s also very quiet and refined as there’s very little road noise nor wind noise.

The Evoque’s diesel engines can be noisy though, especially — once again — when you need a quick burst of acceleration. That sluggish gearbox is easily flummoxed and can be caught hesitating about which gear to offer up, though all models are brisk enough once on the move.

The plug-in hybrid is considerably quieter, but you’ll quickly eat up the battery at motorway speeds so your fuel economy will worsen quickly.

Lane-keeping assistance and cruise control are included as standard, but most models do come with adaptive cruise control that will maintain distance to the car in front.

On a twisty road

The Evoque might be a tall(ish), heavy(ish) off-road-focused SUV, but it’s surprisingly good when it comes to bendy roads. There’s very little body lean, and while the steering isn’t the quickest to respond to your inputs, it does a decent job of feeding back how much grip the front tyres have. If you really want a posh SUV that’s fun in corners, stretching your budget to a Porsche Macan would do wonders.

What about roads that don’t have any tarmac at all? Clearly, a basic front-wheel drive Evoque is going to be challenged by anything more taxing than a bumpy field, but the four-wheel drive models are about as good in the rough stuff as you’d expect a junior Land Rover to be. The 530mm wading depth (that’s just over a foot-and-a-half) is especially useful if you live in an area prone to flooding, and you can even (optionally) spec it with water depth sensors in the wing mirrors so that you don’t dive into anything that the car can’t cope with. It’s no Defender when the going gets really tough, but it’s more capable than pretty much anyone will ever ask it to be.

It’s worth knowing that entry-level models don’t get Terrain Response 2, which is useful if you regularly head off road. It lets you select different modes depending on the surface you’re driving on to help you avoid getting stuck.

Typical Land Rover practicality, and good rear seat space but the boot isn’t as big as it could be

The Evoque offers a lot of storage options up front for such a small SUV. It has enormous door bins, a large glove compartment, a wireless phone charger pad with some additional space underneath a retractable cover, a pair of cupholders and an extra cubby underneath the armrest, to top it all off.

The driving position is pretty good, as you can sit fairly high to get a good view of your surroundings, and there’s loads of adjustment in the steering wheel and seat, which has electric operation on all trims. The narrow windscreen and chunky front pillars can take some adjusting to, because if you set your seat high for a commanding view you feel very close to the roof, but it doesn’t take long to get to grips with.

It’s a shame that the passenger footwell is such an odd shape, because you don’t have to be particularly long-legged to find your feet pressed firmly against the steeply-raked floor.

Space in the back seats

The Evoque’s rear doors open really wide, which is particularly useful if you have a child seat – but the door aperture is quite small which makes it a bit fiddly with larger seats. You get ISOFIX anchor points in the outer two rear seats, but they come with little pop-off plastic covers which are very easy to lose.

It’s acceptably spacious for those travelling in the back, with enough legroom and headroom (even with the optional glass roof) for tall passengers to get comfy enough, although there’s not much space under the front seats to stretch your feet out. The seats are also set quite low in the back, so taller passengers will find that their knees are in the air, which can be a (literal) pain on a longer journey.

The middle rear seat is just about useable, thanks to a relatively small transmission hump, but it is a bit perched-up, and three-across in the back is not massively comfortable. You also have to intrude on the foot space of those either side though, because it’s tricky to find space beneath the seats in front.

The rear door bins are decent, and you get nice LED reading lights and a coat hook mounted at the front of the rear door, so that a dangling coat isn’t in your face. There’s a 12-volt socket, but annoyingly no USB sockets in the back. It’s also annoying that the rear seats are fixed in place — no sliding and no reclining seatbacks. Boo. The Audi Q3 gets those on high-spec models.

Boot space

The boot of the Evoque isn’t the biggest, but at 591 litres it seems massive on paper. That’s because Land Rover quotes its official boot measurements as being loaded to the roof, whereas everybody else only quotes up to the luggage cover.

Taken in those terms, the Evoque’s boot is good but nothing special — and less special again if you go for the plug-in hybrid version, which has an official (Land Rover) measurement of 471 litres.

The BMW X2 has 515 litres of usable boot space by comparison, and the Audi Q3 has 575 litres with the back seats slid forward, while you get just 452 litres in the Volvo XC40.

On non-plug-in hybrid versions there’s some handy under-floor storage, and a spare tyre is available as an option. You get some very solid tie-down points, and the boot itself is square, with no load-lip so it’s easy to get heavy items in and out - though the boot floor is rather high up.

You also get a 12-volt socket and some little elastic straps for holding taller items upright, plus a netted area at the side of the boot and some pop-out hooks for bags. What’s annoying is that you can’t stash the luggage cover under the floor when you don’t need it, but it is flat so you can just put it at the bottom of the boot and load on top.

The back seats split-fold in three sections (40:20:40-style). They stay at an angle rather than folding flat, but you do get a continuous load floor so you can slide big items to the front - if at an annoying angle. With the seats folded you get 1,383 litres of space, compared with 1,386 litres in the Q3.

Some nice bits of style and substance, but overall quality is mixed and the infotainment can’t match the best from the German brands

The cabin design in the Evoque is meant to be simple and uncluttered, giving off a sort of pared-back Scandi luxury hotel look, and it works for the most part. The thing is, that 2023 update went all in on the minimalist idea but fell short, so the centre console just looks a bit plain and, actually, a bit cheap. Where you used to get a crisp screen with slick, embedded dials for the climate controls, now there’s just an expanse of plastic with a gear selector looking lost in the middle.

For the most part, the choice of materials used is good, with lots of nice soft-touch surfaces, but you don’t have to look too hard to find some cheap bits.

Thankfully, there are some very good bits too, including glossy chrome trim around the big infotainment screen and on the doors. The narrow old display has been ditched in favour of a big 11.4-inch screen that sits proud of the dashboard like a big tablet.

It’s about as quick as a tablet too, responding swiftly to touches, and you get Land Rover’s smart and sophisticated graphics. It’s a shame, then, that it’s not the most intuitive system to find your way around.

You also have to put up with the climate settings being on the screen. The temperature is always visible and you can choose between sliding or tapping to change the values. But it’s not as easy to use as similar systems, such as those in an Audi, and changing things like the seat heating is more of a faff than the press-and-spin dials of old.

It’s a similar story for the drive modes. Instead of being easily accessible on the lower screen, you now have to press a button to bring up the menu on the middle screen. This also makes switching between the different energy use modes in the plug-in hybrid awkward.

A digital driver’s display is included on all models and it’s big, crisp, and displays all the information you need. It’s not as impressive as the Virtual Cockpit you get in an Audi, and it’s tricky to find your way between screens and settings, but it does a good enough job.

All models do get standard-fit Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, so it’s easy to set up your phone in the car, and there’s wireless phone charging included on every trim.

There’s a good variety of engines available for the Range Rover Evoque, with two diesel options, one petrol and a petrol-electric plug-in hybrid.

The latter will appeal to company car buyers because it has a low benefit-in-kind tax rate. This 309hp model is more expensive than the other engines though, so private buyers will have to consider whether the lower running costs offset that, including the lower first-year car tax rate.

Fuel economy varied massively in our testing, however, with mixed town running and a motorway journey averaging out to 43mpg. Using the ‘save’ mode – which tops the battery up using the engine while driving – absolutely tanked fuel economy, dropping to around 28mpg on a motorway journey, but averaging out at 36mpg with a bit of ‘hybrid’ driving thereafter.

Moral of the story, if you can’t keep the battery topped up from a charger then you’ll see worse fuel economy than in the non-hybrid petrol engines.

Speaking of which, there are two petrol engines available. The P160 is offered on all but top-spec Autobiography models and has 160hp with fuel economy of 35.3mpg in official tests. It's not a particularly powerful engine for this heavy car, which is reflected in the fuel economy and high CO2 emissions.

The Evoque range opens with the D165 diesel, which has 163hp. It’s usefully economical at 43.6mpg, but is the least appealing of the bunch to drive. You'd be much better off with the D200, which has a useful chunk of extra power at 204hp with identical claimed fuel economy. It's much more relaxed, though CO2 emissions are still quite high at 170g/km.

All models are subject to the luxury car supplement on road tax between years two-to-six.

The Evoque is very safe indeed — Euro NCAP crash-tested it in 2019, and it scored the maximum five-stars for safety, including a 94% rating for adult occupant protection, and 87 per cent for child occupant protection. Both are very good scores, but it is worth noting that tests have become a bit stricter since then.

Standard safety kit includes a rear-view camera, front and rear parking sensors and traffic sign recognition. Step up to Dynamic SE and you get blind spot assistance, rear collision monitor and rear traffic warning. Top-spec models get a 360-degree camera and head-up display.

Land Rover came fifth in the 2025 Driver Power owner satisfaction survey, which is a very impressive result considering 31 brands were entered – and a surprising one, in all honestly, as its reputation for reliability and build quality really couldn’t be much worse.

There will always be question marks about how interiors hold up over time, and while the diesel engines have been around for a while now and are generally quite solid, concerns about faulty electrics, unresponsive touchscreens and fragile gearboxes are well placed.

Land Rover has promised to improve its quality and reliability issues, and the Evoque does come with a three-year, unlimited-mileage warranty, which for an extra cost can be extended out to 10 years (though this does max out at 100,000 miles if that comes first). The warranty also covers you for a hire car to get to your destination if you have a breakdown.

The standard offering is similar to what the likes of Audi and BMW offer, but consider a Lexus if you want long-term peace of mind from your posh SUV – these models get up to 10 years of cover with annual servicing.