Range Rover Hse 2003 on 2040-cars

Auto blog

JLR shares backstage 'No Time to Die' Range Rover Sport SVR carnage

James Bond's latest adventures will take him to Norway and Scotland, as seen in the trailer for the upcoming "No Time to Die." Somewhere along the way, the British spy encounters a pair of Range Rover Sport SVRs, the ultimate high-performance SUV from JLR's Special Vehicle Operations division in one of the movie's centerpiece car chases. Now, the company has given us a behind-the-scenes look at its filming, and the automotive carnage that ensues. The filmmakers wanted to take a Bond action sequence off-road, and chose the Range Rover Sport SVR as the the bad guys' pursuit vehicle. Armed with a JLR product placement deal (Bond drives a new Defender in another part of the movie) the henchmen had no qualms picking one of the most expensive things on the menu. Unfortunately, that also makes is a bit hard to watch when machines that start at $115,000 are totaled as they careen through the air or roll onto their roofs. The SVRs share a 5.0-liter supercharged V8 with the Jaguar F-Type SVR and are the most powerful vehicles in the Land Rover portfolio. With 575 horsepower and 516 pound-feet of torque on tap, translating to a 0-60 time of 4.3 seconds, they're the perfect weapon for chasing a super-spy down a dirt road. As for Bond himself, 007 makes his escape in a decades-old yellow Toyota Land Cruiser Prado. Specifically, it's a 90-series, a smaller version built from 1996 to 2002 that was never sold in the U.S. but remains popular in other parts of the world. The most powerful engine had just 190 horsepower from a 3.4 liter V6 shared with the similar-era 4Runner. Despite the power discrepancy, Bond manages to dispatch the Range Rovers in spectacular fashion. Wait, this is a Range Rover promo, right? "All the stunts are for real, there's nothing that's CGI'ed," said Neil Layton, the film's action vehicle coordinator. "So to make the cars more dramatic on the screen, we had to turn off a lot of safety feature aids that's on there." Interestingly, another non-JLR product shows up in the video as well. The camera car is a blacked out (to minimize reflection in other cars) Ford F-150 Raptor outfitted with a massive rooftop boom. "No Time to Die" is hits the screens on October 8. Related Video: This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings.

Jaguar Land Rover and Cambridge have developed a touchless touchscreen

Jaguar Land Rover and the University of Cambridge are working on new touchscreen technology that eliminates the need to touch the screen. Counterintuitive, right? It’s called “predictive touch” for now, in part because the system is able to predict what you might be aiming for on the screen.  The video at the top of this post is the best way to understand how users will interact with the tech, but weÂ’ll do some more explaining here. You simply reach out with your finger pointing toward the item on screen that you want to select. ItÂ’ll highlight the item and then select it. HereÂ’s how it works, according to the University of Cambridge: “The technology uses machine intelligence to determine the item the user intends to select on the screen early in the pointing task, speeding up the interaction. It uses a gesture tracker, including vision-based or radio frequency-based sensors, which are increasingly common in consumer electronics; contextual information such as user profile, interface design, environmental conditions; and data available from other sensors, such as an eye-gaze tracker, to infer the userÂ’s intent in real time.” Cambridge claims that lab tests showed a 50 percent reduction in both effort and time by the driver in using the screen, which would theoretically translate to more time looking at the road and less time jabbing away at the screen. If the prediction and machine learning tech is good enough, we could see this resulting in a reduced number of accidental inputs. However, on a certain level it almost sounds more difficult to point at a screen while moving than it does to actually touch a section of that screen. Without using the tech and its supposedly great predictive abilities, we canÂ’t come to any grand conclusions. One comparison you may already be thinking of is BMWÂ’s Gesture Controls. ItÂ’s already been addressed with a subtle diss from Cambridge: “Our technology has numerous advantages over more basic mid-air interaction techniques or conventional gesture recognition, because it supports intuitive interactions with legacy interface designs and doesnÂ’t require any learning on the part of the user,” said Dr Bashar Ahmad of the University of Cambridge. Of course, this tech can be used for much more than just vehicle touchscreen control. Cambridge says it could be integrated into ATMs, airport check-in kiosks, grocery store self checkouts and more.

BMW and Jaguar Land Rover to jointly develop electric car tech

FRANKFURT – BMW and Jaguar Land Rover on Wednesday said they will jointly develop electric motors, transmissions and power electronics, unveiling yet another industry alliance designed to lower the costs of developing electric cars. Both carmakers are under pressure to roll out zero-emission vehicles to meet stringent anti-pollution rules, but have struggled to maintain profit margins faced with the rising costs of making electric, connected and autonomous cars. "Together, we have the opportunity to cater more effectively for customer needs by shortening development time and bringing vehicles and state-of-the-art technologies more rapidly to market," said BMW board member Klaus Froehlich. BMW and Jaguar Land Rover said they will save costs through shared development, production planning and joint purchasing of electric car components. Both companies will produce electric drivetrains in their own manufacturing facilities, BMW said. The BMW Jaguar Land Rover pact comes as rivals FiatChrysler and Renault explore a $35 billion tie-up of the Italian-American and French carmaking groups. Nick Rogers, Jaguar Land Rover's engineering director said, "We've proven we can build world beating electric cars but now we need to scale the technology to support the next generation of Jaguar and Land Rover products." BMW was in talks with rival Daimler about developing electric car components but was also in discussions with Jaguar Land Rover, a company it once owned, to explore an alliance on engines. BMW already has a deal to supply an 8 cylinder engine to Jaguar Land Rover. Carmakers are increasingly open to sharing electric car parts because the technology is expensive and because customers no longer buy a car based on what engine a vehicle has. "Carmakers are much less precious about sharing electric car technology because it is much harder to create product differentiation with electric car tech. They all accelerate fast, and everybody can do quality and ride and handling," according to Carl-Peter Forster a former chief executive of Tata Motors and a former BMW executive. Jaguar Land Rover is still run by former BMW managers, including Ralf Speth the company's chief executive who spent 20 years at BMW prior to joining JLR, and Wolfgang Ziebart, the engineer who oversaw Jaguar's I-Pace electric car program, who is a former head of research and development at BMW.