Range anxiety

This was one of those curious events, increasingly common in nature, where a manufacturer shows you a new car and tells you all about it, but only on condition you don’t tell anyone else. My recent story about the Bentley Torcal came with similar strings attached. So forgive the lack of forensic detail as I try to describe what the new Range Rover Sport Electric is, and understand that it’s not because I couldn’t be bothered to find out.

Besides, there is plenty that is already known, or that can be reasonably assumed. And when that runs out there’s always wild speculation to fall back upon, be it accurate, ill-informed or, as is the case more often than you might think, both.

What we know: the Range Rover Sport Electric will sit on the same MLA architecture as all other Range Rover Sports and, indeed, Range Rovers. Like BMW, JLR took the very smart decision a decade or so ago to develop flexible architectures that’ll take any kind of powertrain you want, from battery to diesel. It’s a weight-inefficient solution, but who ever expected, let alone wanted a Range Rover to be light? The flip side of this is that switching from petrol or diesel to EV power doesn’t come with a multi-hundred kilo weight penalty – I’d expect the gain to be more like a few dozen kilogrammes.

We know also that there is an electric version of the Range Rover even closer to the starting gate, so if you assume – and an assumption is all it can be at present – that it uses the same battery pack, it’ll have a 118kWh capacity. We know also it’ll have around 542bhp and making various assumptions based on the size of the battery, the likely weight and aero profile, it’s safe to say you’re not going to be looking at a car with a vast range. I am ready to stand corrected, but if it goes much further than 280 miles in real-world conditions I’d be surprised. So you’ll be looking for a charger at a lot less than that. On the other hand it is a racing certainty it will use the same 800-volt architecture as the Range Rover, so should charge at around 350kW, assuming of course you can find anywhere that’ll dispense current at so lofty a rate.

As for more practical considerations, the electric Range Rover takes a big one-tonne hit to its towing capacity – down to 2500kg – and I can see no reason why the same won’t apply to the electric Rangie Sport. If you still want the full fat 3500kg, you’ll need to buy a V8 or a diesel – not even the plug-in hybrid will do that.

Anyone who does trade in their fossil-fuelled Sport for one of these will find the transition about as easy as you could reasonably expect. You need to plug a charger into a socket rather than a nozzle into a filler, but the interior is essentially the same: clean, attractive and with not enough buttons.

In between such important tasks as driving through an aircraft – it did occur to me that it would have been a more impressive and pleasingly counterintuitive stunt had they built ramps either side of it and allowed us to fly over it instead – I did get to drive the car more normally, as least for a bit.

And there were a couple of revealing aspects to the experience. Firstly, it is initially hard to credit how wieldy this car, which will certainly weigh more than 2.5 tonnes, seems to be. I remember from the normal Range Rover I recently ran just how easy the world’s best four-wheel steering system made manoeuvring in tight confines, but the shorter wheelbase of the Sport plus the lowered centre of gravity brought by battery packs laid out within the wheelbase at axle level brings this to a new level. Only an idiot would call it nimble, but it will turn very adroitly, particularly for a car of its size and mass.

It is also uncomfortably fast. I’d not have chosen to do a launch control start for reasons other than professional curiosity, but it was revealing, insofar as it did that thing EVs so often do in such circumstances and started messing with my inner ear, causing a sense of mild discomfort as it lunged off the line. I guess if you deliberately dial up launch control you are somewhat asking for it but it was still as objectively impressive to witness how quickly it lunges out of the blocks as it was subjectively unpleasant to do so. But I think we can say with some certainty that very few customers are going to find its performance in any way lacking.

From what I could divine from a relatively short period of time doing somewhat silly things in the electric Sport, this is another considered and deftly executed piece of work from JLR, and I suppose there’s no great surprise in that. I suspect that the primary motive for buying one will be overwhelmingly tax-related but you can say the same about every EV-derivative out there.

What I find interesting is that JLR has four sub-brands under its roof, although it would call them brands in their own right: Jaguar, Defender, Range Rover and… anyone?… Discovery. And while it sinks billions into reviving Jaguar, and Defender and Range Rover go seemingly from strength to strength, Discovery appears to have been relegated to the role of the embarrassing old uncle no one wants to talk about. Indeed given that the second-generation Discovery Sport launched in 2019 was an updated version of the first-gen car on an evolved platform, you can say the first genuinely new Discovery, the Discovery 5, was first seen all the way back in 2016. Now all we get are occasional new editions, like the recently announced Discovery Landmark, which is like any other Discovery but with blue paint, a panoramic sunroof, a refrigerator between the seats and various other minor details. Not exactly a transformation.

If there is a plan for Discovery, nobody at JLR that I’ve spoken to is in any mood to discuss it. But something must happen if it too is not to go the same way as did Jaguar until its recent resurrection, and rendered an irrelevance by its aging and under-invested product. Yet if there were an all-new Disco 6 in the offing, would we not know about it by now, 10 years after the last?

I remember the first very well, a car so well received when launched in 1989 that there were no cars available to go on Autocar’s long-term fleet. But so keen was my de facto alma mater to run one, it found the money to buy one, which we ran for years. It was far from the most reliable member of the fleet, yet it still racked up more miles than any other, such was its popularity. The facelifted Discovery 2 was usefully updated, while the Discovery 3, abandoning live axles and a simple ladder chassis was a revolution for Land Rover. The Discovery 4 was another update, but even more masterly than the 2. It remains to this day, and at least to me, as good an example of what a go-anywhere family holdall should be.

It made for a devilishly difficult act for the Disco 5 to follow, but it was undone from the start by its awkward looks and luxury aspirations. And then came the Defender, which hobbled it still further.

I hope Discovery survives, not least because I think it is a brilliant name for a Land Rover product. It’s funny to think the first name on the list back in the 1980s was Highlander, but Toyota already owned the rights. But where should a new Discovery be positioned if its toes are not to be crushed from birth by some or more of the other cars with which it would have to share stable space? Perhaps the smart thing would be to just let it go, or not force the issue and put it on ice until a natural home appears. I’d not want the name to disappear, but better that than the fate that has awaited so many homeless brands, and it just becomes a trim level. A Defender Discovery, with a full length pano roof and a fridge between the seats? No thanks.