There is a place for the consummate all-rounder, like the new Range Rover Sport, in every dream garage.
The Range Rover Sport is that sort of car – the one with the go-anywhere, any time, every time capability, and which also blends in to most places you take it.
Most journeys are simpler in the Range Rover than they would be in almost any other car. It eases into your life. Not one of our testers returned saying they wanted more, or less, of anything; the Sport ideally hits the spot at which it is aimed.
What is also surprising is the genuine difference in driving characteristics built into the Range Rover Sport. It is truly built for a different kind of driver. If you're a keen driver who likes or needs the practicalities or elevated driving position of an SUV, it's hard to see an argument against the Range Rover Sport.
Even the 22mpg you’ll get from the Supercharged is tolerable, given the accessible and impressive performance. That we’d prefer it to be lighter is one of the few holes we’d pick in the Sport’s attire.
Make no mistake, this is an extremely impressive car.
Chris Knapman of Britain's Daily Telegraph reported on the new Land Rover Discovery
Prior to spending the festive fortnight in a 2014 model year Land Rover Discovery, I had always wondered why drivers of 4x4s insist on ploughing through flood water with such reckless abandon. Why, just because they can, they travel at least twice as fast as is necessary, creating a barrage of water that threatens to drown the poor supermini crawling gently through the other way.
The answer, it turns out, is that it’s tremendous fun. Not drowning other cars - that’s still just brutish vandalism - but getting up enough speed to generate a good bow wave, or slamming two and a half tons of off-roader into a puddle the size of Lake Windermere, well, it’s fantastic.
There’s probably also the fact of knowing that, even if it’s only for one or two days of the year, you were justified in your choice of vehicle. That for every extra litre of fuel consumed, and every unnecessarily unrefined motorway mile, your 4x4 was there in your hour of need.
So yes, I very much liked this mildly modified Discovery, which enters 2014 with the subtlest of tweaks in an attempt to keep it feeling fresh alongside newer rivals.
That the most obvious of these is that the badge has changed so that it now reads “Discovery”, rather than “Land Rover”, suggests that the facelift doesn’t run as deep as the puddles this seven-seater spent most of its time wading through. Indeed, you’d need to be a Land Rover obsessive to spot the new grille and headlights, or the fact that the “4” has been dropped from the Discovery badge on the car’s boot.
No matter, for this is still a ruggedly handsome machine. Big, yes, and perhaps still a little ostentatious, but you could level that accusation at most SUVs, and at least with the Discovery you’ve got the knowledge that it can do the whole off-roading thing too.
Also new for the round of updates in this, the Discovery's 25th year, is a stop/start system for the one available engine, a 3.0-litre V6 turbodiesel (helping to reduce emissions from 230g/km to 213g/km of CO2). Plus there’s a few safety features plucked from the Land Rover shelf including a (very useful) blind spot monitoring system and T-junction cameras.
Best of all is the “wade-sensor”, which uses the satnav screen to display just how much cold, muddy water you’re getting yourself into. Only problem is you have to be travelling at less than 6mph for it to work, which is rubbish for making big splashes.
On the inside it’s business as before, meaning a commanding (aka very high) driving position and a usefully roomy interior, not least for the two rear chairs that fold flat into the boot floor. I’m told by my father-in-law, who tested them on a two-and-a-half hour round trip, that they are functional rather than comfortable, but as part-time pews they do the job.
Loaded to the gunwales, the Discovery can carry an awful lot, but thanks to the harmonious marriage of an eight-speed automatic gearbox and 442lb ft of torque from 2,000rpm (along with 261bhp at 4,000rpm) it never feels underpowered. Rather, you surf along on this tidal wave of thrust, slightly astonished that something that weighs this much can still get from 0-60mph in 8.8sec.
What you will need to do, however, is slow down for those pesky corners. Slow steering, lots of body roll and a little thing called the laws of physics mean that a gentle approach is the way to go here, before reaching a straight, knocking down a few cogs and charging towards the next flood. Kabloom! The water thunders up over the Discovery’s blunt nose, making you feel, just for a second, that you’re on a stage of the Camel Trophy. You sit there, pleased as punch as the wipers sweep the screen clear, only to look in the rear-view mirror to see your father-in-law shaking his head in disapproval.
Perhaps he was wishing he was instead in the third row of a Range Rover Sport, with its plusher interior, better ride and more modern styling. Or perhaps not, if he knew that the Discovery costs from £38,850 to the Sport’s £51,550.
How do you update an icon? How do you redefine for a modern audience something conceived generations ago in a very different world? Simple: and you can see how by tuning into BBC America on most Saturday nights.
There you’ll find the latest Doctor Who series. Its genius (and the reason it’s one of the Beeb’s most lucrative exports) is that, while its production standards may be modern, its concept and content have hardly changed. The good Doctor still galaxy-hops in a police box, even though not a single member of its target audience has the slightest idea what a police box is.
Boot has a fitted carpet — why? You’re meant to be able to hose these cars out.
It is to be hoped that the engineers of this new Land Rover Defender are avid viewers, for then they will have seen the formula for regeneration laid out before them. They will know that, whatever changes take place, the fundamental formula has to remain inviolate. Mess up the Defender and you don’t just spoil a car – you defile a national treasure. It should not be something done lightly.
But updated the Defender must be, in what is absolutely its last major rethink before it finally succumbs to the one obstacle that even the world’s most famous off-roader can never hope to climb: the legislator’s pen.
Even to make it this far, it needed a new engine to cope with emissions rules, and that meant a new gearbox. And while the engineers where at it, the suspension and steering have been modified. But the biggest change is a near enough new interior – again to ensure compliance with the rule book, but also to bring a level of comfort and user-friendliness not yet seen in one such as this.
