Luxury coupes—the two-door kind, anyway—are a dying breed these days, no matter how beautiful they may be. No company knows this better than Jaguar, which didn’t bother replacing its slow-selling XK coupe once it retired the model in 2014. Sport-utility vehicles, on the other hand, couldn’t be hotter, as you’re probably well aware, and brands specializing in SUVs, like Jaguar’s sister brand Land Rover, can’t seem to make enough derivations of them. Now, Land Rover has announced that it will fill the gap left by the late Jaguar XK with a luxury two-door of its own: the Range Rover SV Coupe.
This new addition to the portfolio is based on the standard-wheelbase, full-size Range Rover, not the smaller Range Rover Sport, and is being characterized as “a celebration of the Range Rover bloodline, with its dramatic two-door silhouette.” We don’t know much about its design beyond what we can see in this teaser image of its four-place interior. The powertrain remains a mystery, as does pricing, but with the Range Rover SVAutobiography starting at a tick over $200K and coupes usually commanding a bit more money than their four-door counterparts, don’t expect this one to cost any less than that.
Production will be limited to just 999 units worldwide—each built by JLR’s SVO team—a small-enough production number to almost assuredly sell out, but large enough to gauge whether or not there’s a market for two-doors in the super-luxe SUV market. Land Rover already knows that’s not the case among compact crossovers, as the fetching but impractical Range Rover Evoque coupe struggled to lure buyers.
It’s easy to forget that, from the dawn of the sport-utility vehicle up until the 1990s, most were offered at least initially as two-doors, from Cherokees to Blazers to Broncos—including the original 1970 Range Rover. This latest two-door SUV will makes its debut in just over a month’s time at the Geneva auto show.
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