So the continued push to remove the Land Rover branding from the Range Rover continues. The latest evidence comes courtesy of
Land RoverRange Rover’s high resolution pictures. For a while now, the glass on a Range Rover carried the Land Rover logo – shown below from a 2011 model:
But a quick zoom in on the Evoque photos and we see this:
and this:
This actual info on the Range_e has been out for a while, here are the bullet points:
* Range_e: Land Rover advanced plug-in hybrid diesel technology debuts at Geneva Motor Show
* Low emissions and exceptional fuel efficiency: Range_e capable of delivering 89g/km CO2 emissions and a fuel economy of 85mpg
* Electric range: over 20 mile range in all-electric EV mode
* Hybrid programme: Land Rover announces intention to launch first diesel-electric hybrid in 2013Sounds great and all, I look forward to an actual Range Rover getting over 13MPG for me. After reading this article:
I realized that I missed the interior shots that a lot of people got at the Geneva 2011 show. It’s those pictures that show us what the Rotary Gear Selector will look like in a Range Rover Sport, it even gets some nice “Range Rover” branding, just like the previous gear shift lever.
In the last month or so, the Land Rover UK site has been updated to allow you to select the actual options that will be available on the Evoque. There’s plenty of text & pictures.
Visit here and customize one to see what’s available:
http://www.landrover.com/gb/en/rr/range-rover-evoque/build/
One complaint on the options list:
This could be my mistake, but usually the Auto-dimming mirrors do not have that little circled switch, that toggles the mirror up and down – that’s sort of the point of the auto-dimming. Details Land Rover, details!!
As they normally do, Land Rover sends the personalized Roadside Assistance card shortly after taking delivery of a vehicle. This time it arrived in a sliding package with an interesting addition.
On the right is the standard Roadside Assistance card, actually the back of the card.
On the left is the new addition (or new for me at least).
Offering to allow me to create a photo mosaic, I figured it was either a program on the USB key or just a bunch of pictures – similar to how they’ve been doing their press packs lately. So I plugged it in and saw an unexpected sequence – running Windows 7, I saw the Run box appear, text was entered automatically (http://vcgw.net/****/*******, I substituted the asterisks) and then my browser appeared on the web page listed on that card. What I found odd was that there was no prompt, no autorun box(which is actually blocked) – just a Run dialog, text entered and a browser window. So I dug a little deeper into Device Manger:
And there it was under HIDs – USB Input Device. I hadn’t seen one of these before but it’s a very interesting idea – it pretends it’s a keyboard and just enters in the commands directly as if they were being typed. And while being neat, this could also be very, very dangerous – it’s like letting someone sit right at your keyboard. And yes, I did have to plug it in but what if someone was able to hack that intermediate address that the USB device plugs in and instead of it redirecting to www.landroverusa.com/welcomerr it automatically brought up something much more malicious? The actual companies being marketed have to trust that the vcgw.net domain stays legit because if they go out of business and someone plugs this into their computer, who know where it would take them and without any prompting.
Upon further searching, it looks like American Express & others have used the same device for their marketing as well – all with the vcgw.net redirection service.
Again, neat idea but maybe a little over done.
