Range Rover Sport

Pork pie Poms must have choked on their breakfast kippers when blue-blooded SUV brand Range Rover declared the new Sport model would be priced from just $85,000. That's the same kind of money which buys a Holden Caprice sedan or a BMW 3 Series compact. And now it buys a Range Rover Sport equipped with the kind of creature comforts that built the brand’s luxury reputation.

Of course it goes without saying that, as a Range Rover, the Sport will venture miles beyond the blacktop, it'll tow 3.5 tonnes of boat and trailer, and it'll do all this in high style. You’ll be glad to hear, too, that Range Rover's past reputation for glitches and reliability hiccups has well and truly been vanquished beneath an attention to quality and detail that’d do the Germans proud.

In fact it’s no accident that Range Rover - and the Sport in particular - have picked up the Green Oval’s act in terms of trouble-free motoring - the company was owned by BMW for a handful of years in the late 1990s. This, more than anything else, taught the Poms a thing or three about building not only stylish, desirable vehicles, but making them reliable.

So, how does this trend-setting Sport fit into the Range Rover product line-up? It’s effectively a little brother to the top-notch Vogue range, which itself builds on Range Rovers of the past three decades. The Sport is a slightly smaller, more agile offroader, targeted specifically at on-road success stories like the BMW X5 and Mercedes-Benz ML SUVs. So while the Sport is physically smaller, it drives a whole lot better onroad, yet retains 95 per cent of its big brother's bush-bashing capabilities.

Interestingly, the Sport's built on the Land Rover Discovery platform, which keeps all the best bits of a tough ladder frame chassis and combines them with the responsiveness and nimbleness of a monocoque chassis. Range Rover offers three engines under the bonnet; a 4.4 litre V8, a 4.2 litre supercharged V8 or a very refined 2.7-litre V6 turbodiesel (which we tested). All three are mated to a top-shelf six-speed automatic transmission which arguably works better with the turbodiesel than the six-speed manual offered in the Discovery.

The auto's torque converter allows enough 'slip' on takeoff to keep the turbodiesel ticking over in its sweet spot above 1500rpm. Each gearchange is ushered through with Silver Service smoothness and invisibility, doing little to upset the Sport - or the trailer behind. The engine's doing its best work from 1900 to around 4000rpm where it's belting out a 440Nm wall of boat-towing torque. There's little if any performance handicap if you're towing towards the upper limits, but that’s mostly because the Sport weighs a hefty 2.5 tonnes on its own, and with this weight to wage war against, the engine’s never going to be called "spirited” or “punchy".

No, it's far better to let the Sport pick its own pace, supping little more than 13 litres per 100km, and sit back in impressive comfort. There's leather on all the seats, kindly donated by a herd of high quality heffers, electric seats/windows/mirrors/doorlocks, and a plethora of secondary features which will help you entertain the kids on long journeys.

By far the Sport's ace in the hole as far as offroading is concerned, is the Terrain Response system. Drivers simply dial up the type of terrain underfoot, and the Rangie changes throttle sensitivity, diff-locking aggression, traction control settings, steering resistance, ride height and even brake sensitivity to best suit the conditions. For us boaties, this means slippery boat ramps or soft sand beach launches are no longer to be feared - the Rangie handles it all for you. All you've got to do is push the throttle and steer. And, if like most old-time Rangie owners, you have a butler, you probably don't even have to do that.

» Click here for CarPoint's review on the Range Rover Sport

» Click here for CarPoint's further news & reviews articles on the Range Rover Sport range

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