Land Rover strikes a pose with convertible four-wheel drive Range Rover Evoque

There’s an old joke about the number of pristine, perfectly clean Land Rovers you see around – looking such because, of course, they’ve never actually been used any place where they might get dirty.

All that 4x4 potency is wasted – aside, of course, from making the driver feel that bit more macho than his pedestrian desk job typically allows. One enterprising company even offered “Sprayonmud”, “to give neighbours the impression you’ve just come back from a day’s shooting or fishing – anything but driving around town all day.

Drivers of Land Rover’s Range Rover Evoque have no need for such fakery, and those of its new Evoque convertible even less so. The latter seems to be a tacit admission by the car maker that outward bound activities are extremely unlikely. Here is a car that is, if you like, the wonderful Defender’s evil twin. While the boxy, go anywhere potential of the Defender is expressed in all of its right angles (here’s a vehicle devised using a set square), the Evoque is all rakish lines, the fabric roof down only emphasising the car’s sweep up to the rear, and its distinctive, love-it-or-loath-it squashed form.

Promotional images of the Evoque convertible climbing snowy mountainsides seem moot – there’s nowhere to put your skis, unless that’s the real purpose of the folding roof. And yet climb mountains it certainly can. For all that the Evoque convertible looks like a city runaround with a fondness for pumping iron; it still has Land Rover’s legendary off-road capability, albeit one set to be ignored more than with any other member of the Land Rover posse. It can happily drive up a 45-degree gradient, which is great for visits to the Himalayan branch of Prada. It can tilt to 35 degrees too and wade through half a metre of water. There’s even a depth gauge, so you know when to wade no further without risking dowsing your Manolos.

Such a skill set requires some impressive engineering, and all the more so in a convertible. “Torsional rigidity” is the term automotive designers use to express how much a car does or doesn’t flex along its axis, physical flexibility in cars generally regarded as a bad thing. Maintaining rigidity is made much easier by having a roof. Impressively then, the Evoque convertible matches the standards set by previous Land Rovers. Should you decide to test that rigidity to extremes – in a desperate dash for the last parking space, for example – a hidden roll-over protection system deploys in 90 milliseconds. And there’s a smart early warning system for driver fatigue. Well, all that retail therapy can be exhausting.