Landrover Freelander gains lower price, 2.0T gasoline engine

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The Land Rover Freelander has been in the Chinese market for a number of years already but it hasn’t racked up the sales chart in the same way that the Audi Q5, BMW X3 and Mercedes GLK did, in fact the Freelander seems to have just about been forgotten. The likely culprit for less than brilliant sales was the high price, originally the Freelander came in at around 500,000rmb for the bottom of the line diesel model, and there we said that dirty D-Word. Chinese car consumers are not as fanatical about the black fuel as their European counterparts, in fact it is a major turn off due to the chronic diesel shortages and the banning of diesel vehicles from certain cities.

For 2012/13 Land Rover have put their thinking caps on, they lowered the price of the base 2.2 Turbo Diesel model to a more palatable 390,000rmb and introduced the 2.0T gasoline engine from the strong selling Evoque into the Freelander. However, as the Evoque is such a strong seller Land Rover dealers are asking for more money for the model, at one point Chinese media reported that the Evoque had gone up in price by 180,000rmb on top of its 620,000rmb starting price, which makes the Freelander look like a solid option.