Land Rover Discovery Sport
GOODBYE
£50,635 OTR/£58,990 as tested/£570pcm
WHY IT’S HERE
To prove LRs are best when they’re more ‘utility’ than ‘sport’
DRIVER
Tom Ford
A SMALL ASTERISK IS A WINDOW INTO A WORLD OF HALF-TRUTHS.
A get-out clause that allows a company to stab the best features into your mind’s eye, asterisking the small print somewhere towards the bottom of the page, the stuff that says ‘only if you spend twelvety thousand pounds more’. Thus you can have ‘available from’ next to figures that you only achieve with the car that’s twice the price. But at TopGear, we are not fooled. And so, in a month of unscientific deconstruction, we have subjected our Discovery Sport to some rigorous real-world testing.
I started with the obvious stuff; speed and efficiency, based on Land Rover’s own figures for this model, in pretty much this spec. Acceleration: the official number is 7.9 seconds, and try as I might, I could only manage 8.8. I haven’t been able to test to the purported 136mph top end, so I failed pretty early, though I did go moderately quickly at the track (118mph), and acceleration tails off significantly after about 110mph, though I suspect it probably would do 130+. Efficiency-wise, I’ve done speed and mpg tests. It’s supposed to do 38.4mpg combined according to the manufacturer’s website, but I got a high of 44.1mpg, and a low (town use) of 28.1. Off-road it dropped even further (26.4), bizarrely to roughly the same level as a few laps of a racetrack. Figure that one out. In reality, mixed usage and my usual tame driving style offers up around 34.5mpg. So not ridiculously far off the quoted figure.
It will swallow seven whole people, and the rearmost seats aren’t anywhere near as bad as you imagine, though six-footers will feel like their knees are too close to their ears. There’s a big rectangular box of a boot that will accommodate bigger dogs – though not with the seven seats in place, obviously. Drop the seats and you can get three-quarters of a single garage into it, and once you’ve got the pseudo-suede cloth seats muddy, they clean up a treat. That’s science, that is. And it’ll tow as happily as anything bar a full-fat Discovery or V8 diesel Land Cruiser. It will also off-road. Spectacularly.
The R-Dynamic bodykit, as specced here, is low enough to decrease the car’s approach angle, but you can get around that by being careful. And once you’ve got the car up the face of a surface, it’ll drive up pretty much anything. The Terrain Response system takes up a lot of the skillset slack, variously softening the throttle, or tightening the effects of the electronic diff locks, slowing wheel speed and maintaining momentum. If you drive with some care, and are aware of the car’s capability, there isn’t much it won’t do. The marketing doesn’t lie so much as simply present the best case scenario, and the Disco Sport is a seriously impressive bit of kit in several ways that 99 per cent of owners probably won’t experience. In fact, for a non-urban family do-it-all, it’s pretty hard to beat. You can read about the testing procedure in more detail – and with more pictures – on the TG website.