Attitude And Ability

Blaze’s own Stig look-alike, Andrew Koch has been out and about in the latest Range Rover Sport – a premium SUV blending off road ability with luxury.

While traditional Land Rover models have combined unbeatable off-road performance with the amenities of a luxury sedan, the Range Rover Sport represents Land Rover’s first entry into the burgeoning high-performance Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) arena. It is designed to offer sporty road manners and traditional Land Rover luxury without sacrificing the go-anywhere abilities of other Land Rovers, all of which it does admirably.

Despite its name, the Range Rover Sport is actually a modified and shortened version of the Discovery 3. As such, the Sport is the smallest and most nimble SUV in the company’s lineup. I use the word nimble a little loosely as it’s still a tad less than 2 tonnes.

We took the baby engine of the range, the TDV V6 diesel, to the beach where, for the most part, it performed well through the sand dunes. Not so good if the dune was too steep, as the weight of the vehicle eventually won and we ended up sinking into the sand. Getting to the beach and cruising up the highway was an absolute breeze.

Handling performance is fantastic. The Range Rover Sport is the first Land Rover to offer the company’s Dynamic Response suspension system which is only standard for the top of the range 4.2 V8 VC (we had it as an option in our test car.) Land Rover says that this computer-controlled system senses cornering forces and automatically adjusts the anti-roll bars to optimise body control and handling.

The Rangie offers a myriad of suspension choices for various terrains. For the sandy beach we chose the image of the Mexican cactus – aka sand mode. The vehicle raises itself quite considerably, enough to avoid situations over the sand dunes that could be quite embarrassing. But it will start lowering itself if you drive over 40 kilometres for an extended period of time (the over 40ks chimes are incessant.) We sailed past a Holden Rodeo with its nose firmly planted in the sand after what I image was an ambitious attempt at one of the steeper dunes on the beach.

Land Rover is synonymous with luxury, which doesn’t take a backseat in the Range Rover Sport. Just about every premium feature that you will find in most luxury sedans, or any of its luxury SUV competitors, is available in the Range Rover Sport. The same holds true for safety items, with the usual complement of airbags and electronic crash-prevention aids.

So if you’re in the market for an SUV and have around a 100K, pop this one on shopping list.

This article was taken from: Blaze

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 8:31 am and is filed under Range Rover. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.