Range Rover Sport SV passenger ride review: first thoughts on fastest Rangey

• What’s clever about the chassis?
• What’s the engine like?
• Anything else of note?
• Specs

View all Land Rover Reviews

We’ve just had our bum tingled by the intriguingly named Body And Soul Seats and had a comprehensive walkaround with the design team, but now we’re sat in the passenger seat of the new Range Rover Sport SV next to SVO vehicle dynamics manager Ross Restell ready to be shown just what it’s capable of.

This is the most comprehensively upgraded Range Rover that SVO has put out – it’s by some measure the quickest, too, capable of 0-60mph in a staggering-for-two-and-a-half-tons 3.6 seconds. It has a 4.4-litre twin-turbocharged V8 putting out 626bhp and 553lb ft which, once it’s done getting you to the legal limit will push on to a 180mph top speed.

It’s mainly the chassis and suspension we’re here to experience, though. Keep reading for our first thoughts from the passenger seat of the Range Rover Sport SV.

What’s clever about the chassis?

SVO’s fitted what it calls ‘6D Dynamics’ to the Sport SV. In less corporate terms, this means that there’s 25 metres of hydraulic piping interlinking the dampers and doing away with the need for anti-roll bars. They provide pitch and roll control, a first in the industry and a bit of physics-cheating to temper the car’s height and weight.

Ross starts by putting the suspension into one of its off-road modes. Not that it’s needed for the tarmac of JLR’s Gaydon test circuit, but it’s to show us the car’s natural roll tendencies. Sure enough, it rolls, not drastically but noticeably.

A quick flip into SV mode, via the button at the base of the steering wheel, and the car’s attitude immediately changes. Pitch and roll, as promised, are almost totally cancelled out. Ross stands on the brakes and performs a full-bore start – where the old car would have nose-dived under braking and squatted under acceleration, this one stays impressively level.

In a slalom the lack of body movement is almost disconcerting – hats off to the chief physics-cheater, as this is a 2.5-ton, tall SUV cornering as flat as a sports car.

Braking too is impressive – the Range Rover Sport SV (optionally) wears JLR’s first set of carbon-ceramics and the stopping power on offer certainly has the capacity to rearrange faces.

The Gaydon circuit has a section that’s set up with potholes, drain covers, and all the usual furniture you’ll find on any stretch of pockmarked British tarmac. Ross takes us over this section in SV mode as well as Dynamic and Comfort, pointing out that he ‘doesn’t see much point in having a driving mode that’s too stiff for you to use’. True enough, while SV and Dynamic modes are undeniably firm, they’re not unbearably so.

We finish with some high-speed cornering, pulling the G-meter up on the dashboard to see if Ross can match SVO’s claim that the Sport SV will pull 1.1G on its standard tyres. We top out at 1.05…

What’s the engine like?

Fast and suitably throaty, building to a refined bellow at the top end. We miss the mad volume of the old 5.0-litre supercharged unit fitted to this car’s predecessor, but as Ross points out that engine really is a bit of a dinosaur now. Still, twin-turbo feels dull compared with the subtle whine of a supercharger, and the noise feels a little too prim, a little too contained.

The new V8 offers an extra 60bhp and 37 lb ft, but with a 15% improvement in economy and CO2. WLTP combined figures sit at 24.1mpg and 267g/km, which don’t seem too bad given the performance on offer. Though clearly, expect figures in the teens when driving, ahem, dynamically. Being BMW-derived might actually be good news for reliability, too.

In sheer emotional terms, then, it’s a downgrade from the old car – but measured by more pragmatic metrics, it’s an improvement. And there’s no doubting the performance on offer. A launch-controlled start (pumping as many of those 626 horses as possible to the rear wheels) is dispatched with minimal drama and feels every bit as quick as the figures suggest. The ‘regular’ V8 with a mere 523bhp isn’t our favourite engine in the standard Sport, though – so we’ll see if it plays more nicely with the eight-speed ZF ‘box now that SVO has got their hands on it.

Anything else of note?

The new sports seats are comfortable and grippy, and swathed in cool ‘Ultrafabrics’ which feel less sweaty than Alcantara and less slippery than leather. The latter does remain optional for those who demand to sit on cow. The rear bench has been shaped into two individual seats, too, rather than a flat bench, so rear-seat passengers won’t be flung about in hard cornering.

A particularly standout addition to the dash is illuminated paddle shifts, which are a bit gaudy as they light up bright red in SV mode. Ditto the illuminated SV button at the base of the steering wheel.

What else? Only that most of this is purely educational at this point. The first year’s production of the Range Rover Sport SV has been reserved for specially selected buyers only – the rest of you plebs will have to wait your turn, in 2024. We’re informed that Land Rover’s press office has been allowed to hang on to a couple, though, so we’ll bring you a fuller review as soon as we get behind the wheel ourselves.

Specs

Keyword: Range Rover Sport SV passenger ride review: first thoughts on fastest Rangey