Range Rover P510e review

This hybrid powertrain is brilliantly effective and on a full charge you’ll have between 40 and 50 miles of zero-emissions driving at your disposal, making local journeys cheaper and cleaner. The powertrains of these two Range Rovers are identical but their soundtracks are not. You hear a very obviously augmented six-cylinder warble any time you bury the throttle pedal in the Sport, but in the Range Rover you get none of that. Instead it’s quiet and serene, even when every single one of those 503 horses is galloping headlong at the horizon. That’s one of the more significant ways in which Land Rover has given these two very similar cars quite different identities.

The new Sport is so broadly defined, so wonderfully luxurious while also being every bit as athletic as such a car could ever need to be, that you question why anyone would pay more for the full-size model. You wonder that right up until you actually drive the Range Rover and realise there’s still something about the big one, something that seduces you within the first mile. It is even quieter and smoother; it feels more regal still. You are happier at its wheel. Suddenly the Sport seems exactly like the understudy it was all along.

The ride quality is exemplary, noise suppression sublime and yet the steering is so accurate, so natural in its rate of response that you thread this behemoth at speed between the narrow hedgerows with unwavering confidence. And when the road twists this way and that and kicks up and down, the Range Rover keeps its enormous mass under such close control you’d swear it weighed a third less and cast a far smaller shadow than it really does. This new model is both more comfortable and more agile than the last, which is really quite remarkable.

At least it is in this specification. Because Land Rover hasn’t managed somehow to invert the laws of physics – it has simply thrown a skip-load of very sophisticated technology at the problem. This P510e has 48-volt active anti-roll bars that can decouple and reattach on the move to improve ride comfort and handling precision, plus an active rear differential. That’s on top of the very large volume air springs, adaptive damping, torque vectoring by braking and rear-wheel steering.

Which is wonderful, if you’re paying £131,355 for the P510e or £137,820 for the range-topping V8. Because not all of that hardware is fitted to every Range Rover variant. Would the car be ruined without it? Possibly not, because the non-PHEV versions are lighter in some cases by more than 350kg, which would perhaps make that clever tech somewhat redundant. Again, we’ll drive one soon and report back.

What’s obvious right away is that there’s no other class of car that benefits quite so handsomely from all this active technology. Supercars, fast saloons, sports cars and even hot hatchbacks are being made cleverer by new hardware, but also more complicated and heavier, and rarely are they more fun to drive because of it. But luxury cars, and luxury SUVs in particular, are unquestionably better for being filled floor to headlining with this stuff, better able to blend the comfort that’s crucial in such machines with the response and agility that’s desirable for those rare occasions when one does want to press on cross-country.

Of course for such escapades the Sport is better suited thanks to its tuning, and while the new Range Rover does lean more extravagantly in bends, though its steering may not be quite so pin-sharp and the effects of its rear-steer not quite so pronounced, it will find its way along a twisting, turning road more enthusiastically than any full-size Range Rover before it.

Meanwhile, its cabin is like a sanctuary. A storm could be raging outside, rain lashing against the windows, but with barely a sound disturbing the cockpit, the car untroubled by bumps and potholes in the road, your seat massaging your back, your legs and hands kept toasty warm by the heated seats and steering wheel, all will be well in your world. That, combined with how imperiously this new Range Rover navigates any kind of road, means it is probably the most impressive Land Rover I’ve driven.

But I wonder if there is one that’s better still. Because the purely petrol-powered V8 is even more powerful, lighter by almost 300kg, still equipped with all that chassis technology that seemingly makes such a difference to how the Range Rover drives and, well, it has a thumping V8 motor beneath its bonnet. Land Rover is right to offer these PHEV variants and it won’t cross the minds of certain buyers to consider any other model. But I’m not at all convinced a plug-in hybrid powertrain makes for an objectively better Range Rover.

I can’t leave it there. More has to be written about the weight of this car, first because I suspect a set of scales would in fact reveal it to be heavier than the equivalent Sport, if only by a bit, and second because 2735kg is a ludicrous amount of mass for any car. Sophisticated technology can disguise that sort of weight very effectively these days and buyers, it seems, simply aren’t concerned about these rapidly expanding waistlines.

But they should be. Though it doesn’t necessarily feel like it, that weight is always there. It’s there any time you need to accelerate a car like this back up to speed; it’s certainly there when you have to shed that speed very quickly. You’ll be made only too aware of that as your car sails past the point where a lighter vehicle has come to a complete stop and you’re still bowling along with so much momentum beneath you.

Quite soon, we will road test new cars that weigh more than 3000kg week in, week out. They’ll be battery-electric SUVs, of course. How will future generations reflect on such machines? We’ll have much more to say on the matter in the next couple of weeks…