First Sight: Van Roij Adventum Coupe

Cast your mind back to the 2018 Geneva Motor Show and you may remember the Range Rover SV Coupe Concept, a slightly sleeker, significantly more expensive Range Rover with two doors and some special high-end touches. In the end, this project was never put into production. Clearly a handful of people were deeply disappointed by the cancellation, because someone subsequently contacted Niels van Roij Design, of Tesla estate fame, asking if they would pick up the challenge to build such a thing. As you can see, they did, with the aid of automotive modeller and body builder Bas van Roomen. CDN was at the private launch event in the Netherlands.

– Key sketches, including different CMF ideas

The resulting Adventum Coupe (we’ll spare you a rant about both companies using that particular C-word on an upright SUV…) was inspired not just by the 2018 concept, but by the 1970 original Range Rover which was sold only as a two-door until 1981. That car was, of course, not marketed as a coupé, instead having a more stately nature about it – and this is something Van Roij and his team were keen to instill in their refreshingly restrained new Adventum, in stark contrast to the ‘customised’ Range Rovers you see elsewhere…

– Official photos of the build and material selection processes

As such, they resisted any temptation to do a ‘chop top’ job and instead left the roofline unchanged from the standard four-door car – as well as the front end and tailgate. However, in the name of both proportions and rear-seat access, the B-pillar has been pulled back by 15 centimetres by a third-party specialist – which, because even the standard roofline is not dead-straight, required a bit of rejigging to make everything fit correctly.

Speaking of which, in Van Roij’s quest for a very clean look, the plastic gills on the standard car’s front doors were removed, which revealed to the team that the neat swage line joining headlight to taillight doesn’t actually line up correctly at the front of the door (this comment has had us studiously examining every current-gen Range Rover we’ve seen on the street since)… but no matter. Since new, longer aluminium doors and rear quarterpanels were to be hand-beaten into shape anyway, that problem could be solved in the process – a process very deliberately involving traditional coachbuilding techniques, for added authenticity.

Interestingly, the silver trim piece which joined onto the bottom of those door gills has remained in place, as it still does a good job of tying the bodyside design together by running from door to rear bumper.

A larger headache during the design phase was the redesigned shutline of the new, single door on each side, which went through numerous iterations until it gained a ‘fast’ angle around the lower trailing corner, to try to counteract any slab-sidedness the car may have gained in having its main volume cleaned up.

At one stage, they also experimented with the idea of a fuel filler cap that was deeply inset into the body in the same style as that of the original Range Rover, but decided not to incorporate it into the first Adventum seen in these photos. Similarly, they experimented with different grille patterns and colours before ultimately keeping the original one in place.

– Sketched ideas that didn’t make it onto the first example built (plus an original Range Rover for reference)

The goal, as it often is for a coachbuilder working with a modified OEM design, was to create an “OEM+” feel wherein, despite the custom-made bodyside panels, side glass and interior trim, it all looks and feels as if it could’ve come from the factory this way in the first place as a high-end model.

The interior has been done similarly, retaining the vast majority of what was already there and simply reskinning it all in new, super-soft leather and new trim pieces (all of which is chosen and made to order for each client, naturally). The only exceptions to this are an extra pair of door handles for rear-seat passengers to pull, and the rather exuberant addition of teak decking that runs from the front of the footwell to the back of the boot floor. On the show car, it even features thick white sealant to match the exterior paint – although again, one needn’t spec their own flooring that way when commissioning their own.

The finishing touch? A pair of personalised, branded umbrellas in the boot, incorporating elements of the interior CMF, which would have come in handy both during the official photoshoot and on the day of the launch.

Van Roij Design is planning to build just 100 Adventums, all powered by JLR’s 5.0 supercharged V8 in a tune of your choice, with each car taking six months from commission to completion. Prices start at €270,000 before taxes.

Or, as a lower-cost alternative, you can always scroll through the galleries below:

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