Gavin Green: o -roaders, o -road
The month began in the back of a Rolls-Royce Cullinan and finished driving a Land Rover Defender 90 in the mud. Most new cars seem to be SUVs these days, but before I talk about all the 4x4s driven recently, let’s start at the beginning. The nice Rolls-Royce chauffeur arrived to collect me and parked outside my house and my neighbour’s (the Cullinan is a very big car). The first thing the driver did was give me a mask. It has Rolls-Royce branding and continues to attract admiring glances.
The Cullinan is the roomiest, most refined and most comfortable SUV in the world. It’s also a limo-lorry leviathan, a dinosaur in size and in concept (12-cylinder SUVs do not have much longer to roam the Earth). I’d like to say the looks have grown on me since I drove it two years ago in Wyoming, but I can’t. Mind you, there’s technical wizardry in its Phantom-like refinement and ride quality. It is the king of big SUVs: a car of brilliance without wisdom, technical prowess without taste, success without goodwill.
I was on my way to Goodwood to see Rolls-Royce CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös, a noted Anglophile despite all the umlauts. He told me the Cullinan was selling like Veuve Clicquot at the Ritz and would be the company’s best-seller, perhaps alongside the new Ghost. Some fabulously rich younger customers were gravitating to the Ghost instead. ‘They now think an SUV is a car for their dad.’ Is this the end of the trend to premium SUVs?
A few days later I collected a much-lauded new car, the Ford Puma. This is essentially a pumped-up Fiesta and the sweetest-driving SUV on the road. It steers and handles almost as fluently as a Fiesta, the best-driving supermini. It’s also light by SUV standards, a modest 1280kg (or a whole Mondeo less than a Cullinan, and with the same number of seats). Plus, I’ve always loved Ford’s tuneful 1.0-litre triple-cylinder engine.
But there’s the usual SUV caveats. What does a Puma offer that the donor Fiesta does not? A touch more rear seat room and a bigger multi-functional boot. It’s also pricier, longer and wider, 100kg heavier and no more all-condition capable. If you want a small SUV, buy a Puma. But the Fiesta is more fun to drive and almost as practical.
Next up, there was a fleet of new Land Rovers. Despite being Europe’s first premium car maker to launch an electric car, the excellent i-Pace, Jaguar Land Rover has been a plug-in-hybrid laggard. There were two to drive, the Range Rover Evoque P300e and its mechanically identical, more spacious but less stylish twin, the Discovery Sport P300e.
Commendably, a lighter and more economical 1.5-litre three-cylinder engine is fitted to these PHEVs. Plus, these two Merseysiders can do 30-plus miles on electric power, which is better than most. Cabin design and quality are also excellent, increasingly a Land Rover signature.
The Discovery Sport P300e is now surely JLR’s best family car, unless you have a few acres to park a Disco 5. Mind you it’s heavy by ‘small’ SUV standards, at 2.1 tonnes (like the PHEV Evoque), the same weight as a Puma with a Lotus Elise on its roof.
Finally, I churned up the mud on a tough off-road route at Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire in a Defender 90. This was the base model, on steel springs rather than optional height-adjustable air suspension. The 90 is the pick of the new Defenders, the best looking, smallest, cheapest, most manoeuvrable and most off-road capable, and it works just fine riding on steel. We waded streams, wallowed through deep mud and clambered up impossibly steep rocky and rutted slopes, revelling in the astonishing all-condition proficiency of Land Rover’s most all-terrain-adept 4x4.
This of course is what SUVs were originally designed for: to explore, go places normal cars can’t, to discover the wildness and wonders of our world. Like my Namibian odyssey in a new Defender 110 (see CAR, May 2020), and boyhood Outback adventures in my dad’s Land Cruiser, it was wonderful to enjoy a 4x4 where it best belongs.