The Sport is not new but improved, with new technology and updated designs, inside and out, boasting creature comforts, like a built-in refrigerator.
BROADWAY, England — When I woke up a few weeks ago in the Dormy House Hotel — official address: Dormy House, Farncombe Estate, Willersy Hill, Broadway, Worcestershire, United Kingdom (ain’t that grand? Sure beats “Trawna,” doesn’t it?) — I turned on the television.
I did not want to watch the BBC news, which is mostly sanctimonious and boring, so I kept clicking the converter until I came to the ITV morning show, and boy, was I in for a surprise.
Remember when CNN decided Larry King was too old for network television and gave him the boot? And turned over his highly successful talk show to a British guy named Piers Morgan? We all remember how that turned out, don’t we?
To make a long story short, Piers is back home and is as conceited on the Good Morning Britain program as he ever was on American television. Good thing he’s got a sidekick with him, Susanna Reid, who’s good at mugging it up just about every time Piers opens his mouth.
Piers says something and Susanna looks straight into the camera and lets her eyes speak for her, as in: “Is he daft?” Or, “What is this man doing here?”
The morning I watched, Piers — thinking he was being amusing — was trying to embarrass the weather person, a guy named Alex Beresford. He wasn’t having much luck, for starters, and Susanna eventually rode to Alex’s rescue.
What got my attention, however, was that while Alex was doing the weather in Celsius, I had been driving around the Cotswolds region of England the day before in a 2018 Range Rover PHEV and everything was in Imperial. The GPS voice would say, “In 300 yards, turn left, then follow that road for 13 miles.”
It turns out that when Britain joined the EU in 1995, everything was supposed to become metric except pints of beer and distance travelled in miles, plus another couple of things. That was all to end in 2009, but the Brits refused to make any further change.
And I say Bravo to them. I always felt that when you started messing around with how people talk, you’d be asking for trouble. I mean, changing “a pint of bitter” to “568 millilitres of bitter” just doesn’t cut it, does it? Nor should it.
So, I was a happy guy later that morning when I embarked on a test of the Range Rover Sport SVR V8, knowing full well we would be heading for a Jaguar Land Rover Test Track at Fen End and I would be pushing the pedal to the metal as hard as I could and be able to tell how fast I was really going.
More about that in a moment, though. First, let me tell you about the car.
The Sport is not new but improved, with new technology and updated designs, inside and out. When it arrives in Canadian showrooms — any day now, in fact — the Sport lineup will consist of V6 and V8 gasoline models, a V6 Diesel and the fastest car the company has ever made, the 575-horsepower Range Rover Sport SVR.
Come summer, you will be able to purchase a 2019 plug-in Sport hybrid. You will be able to fully charge the 114 hp electric motor overnight and that will give you up to 50 kilometres of electric-only driving in EV mode.
Should you choose it, the Parallel Hybrid mode combines gasoline and electricity for longer distances. And one of the car’s management functions, called Predictive Energy Optimization, can be activated by typing an address into the navigation system. By determining whether you are in city or country, plus several other variables, including traffic conditions, the system will combine gas and electricity for maximum efficiency. By 2020, incidentally, all new Land Rover and Jaguar vehicles will have an electric option.
Now, back to the Sport SVR. The marketing people love to wax eloquently about the significance of exterior and interior design changes but, to be frank, the Sport looks like just about every other Range Rover out there, which is to say, distinctive. In its never-ending quest to one-up its rivals, however, this car does have a couple of wrinkles that should be pointed out.
You can order, for instance, a refrigerator for the centre front console. It can hold four 500 mL bottles of pop. And get this: if your Coke is warm when you get into the car, the fridge has a “rapid cool” function that chills your drinks really quickly. There is also a new air ionization system that ionizes particles in the air so they will stick to surfaces, thus helping to cleanse the air in the cabin.
There are two high-definition, 10-inch touch screens with a program called Touch Pro Duo, which the manufacturer says is the most advanced infotainment system to date. Why two? Mapping appears on the top one while controls for other features are on the bottom.
And get this: information such as speed and driver-assistance alerts (sign recognition) can be projected onto the windshield. You don’t have to refocus your eyes constantly in order to take all of this in. The steering wheel has the cruise control, phone, and radio controls on it. The now-usual driver aids — emergency braking, lane assist, etc. — are also included. And if you want to take the Sport off-road, you can do that, too — although this car is built for speed.
The 5.0-litre supercharged V8 is the most powerful engine that Ranger Rover has ever produced. To this end, the engineers spent much of their time on the car focused on controlling pitch under heavy acceleration and braking. Different dampers — different from other Range Rovers, that is — improved turn-in and grip.
All of that has come together to work magnificently. On the test track at Fen End, I got up to 233 km/h before having to brake for a high-banked turn that went to the right. If the turn had been to the left, I like to think I could have gone faster.
Canadian Tire Motorsport Park doesn’t have a turn either way that’s banked as steeply (think Daytona) but track days there are still the best way to put this magnificent beast through its paces.
The Sport will start at $132,000, which is clearly in Audi and Mercedes territory. The ensuing battle for the hearts (and wallets) of consumers will be fun to watch — almost as much fun as watching Susanna Reid taking the mickey out of Piers Morgan.
Keyword: Range Rover Sport Needs a Track to Really Stretch its Legs