Land Rover Discovery Sport SD4 New engine
Twin-turbo four-cylinder diesel brings 367lb ft to the party
To the surprise of nobody, the Discovery Sport is Land Rover’s fastest-selling model. Just how popular is it? Well, more than 200,000 have rolled out of the firm’s Halewood plant since it replaced the aging Freelander in 2014.
That popularity is likely to now get a boost with the introduction of Jaguar Land Rover’s latest fourcylinder Ingenium engines to the range, including two Si4 petrol options – with 237bhp and 286bhp – and an SD4 diesel, driven here.
Equipped with a pair of sequential turbochargers, it promises robust performance, developing 237bhp and, more appreciably, a 367lb ft slug of torque at 1500rpm. The lesser TD4 diesel makes 177bhp and 317lb ft by comparison, although both models share a nine-speed automatic gearbox that channels power to all four wheels. (As an aside, Land Rover will from now offer a front-wheeldrive version of the Discovery Sport, a base-spec model badged Pure, but in only 147bhp ed4 diesel guise.)
The SD4 is impressively potent but not as refined as you might expect, the rather gruff idle literally setting the tone for an engine note that is never what you’d call intrusive but is always present. Certainly, those hopping from the polished confines of an Audi Q5 2.0 TDI might raise an eyebrow, although anybody acclimatised to the corresponding powerplant in Nissan’s X-trail would be pleasantly surprised. Incidentally, the car’s combined fuel economy of 44.1mpg is bettered by even the 3.0-litre TDI Q5, demonstrating that Land Rover has some way to go before its oil-burning engines match the best in class.
But what of that performance? A 0-60mph time of 7.1sec puts the near two-tonne SD4 Disco Sport on a level with warm hatches such as Volkswagen’s Golf GTD, although it doesn’t always feel particularly quick. Part of the responsibility for that falls to the nine-speed gearbox, which in fairness juggled cogs with impressive ease while flowing along the meandering Yorkshire Dales roads of the car’s launch. In fact, we barely noticed as the rev-counter’s needle gently swooped up and down, keeping the engine in its sweet spot.
Frustrations arose when we required a burst of acceleration, however, because there was a lengthy delay before the transmission found the most appropriate of its closely packed ratios.
The Discovery Sport SD4 otherwise remains an attractive, likeable, dependable but expensive quantity, with an interior constructed of hardwearing yet high-quality materials and a level of sophistication that’s merely satisfactory for this class.