Land Rover Discovery HSE Td6 2017 Review

Land Rover Discovery HSE Td6
Prototype Off-Road Test
Scotland

Big things are, let’s face it, impressive. The Empire State Building would not have the wow factor if it were the height of a bungalow. No-one would come to see the Not-So-Great Barrier Reef and Uluru is not a world heritage site because it’s a small boulder.

Bigness isn’t all-important of course (or so my wife tells me), but sheer size is hugely impressive and that’s certainly true of the Royal Navy’s newest pride and joy, the aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth.

At 280 metres long, it’s designed to operate with a mixture of F-35 fast-attack jets and helicopters, but for today, still tied alongside the dock in the Rossyth shipyard just outside Edinburgh in Scotland there’s not an aircraft in sight.

There is a new Land Rover Discovery perched on the ‘ski-jump’ ramp at the end of this giant floating runway though, proving that even when there’s something much bigger around, big is still impressive.

There are myriad connections between Land Rover and the Royal Navy (not the least of which is that the QE’s chief engineer is a former Land Rover employee), but the reason we were presented with the car on the half finished flight deck was, simply enough, that big things are just cool, and that coolness was rubbing off on the Discovery.

Not quite the finished Discovery though. The new 4x4 doesn’t enter full production until early next year, and so these cars were late prototypes – representative of the final article but not 100 per cent signed off yet.

Consequently there would be no on-road driving for us. Which was fine, to be honest. Once off the aircraft carrier and up into the highlands, in amongst the mud, the trees and the rocks, the Discovery felt totally at home.

Which in one sense just doesn’t compute. Land Rover calls this car its ‘Digital’ Discovery and from its slick, sleek Range-Rover-esque styling (which stands in total contrast to the old upright-as-a-brick Series 3 and Series 4 Discovery) it’s clearly designed to appeal to dazzling urbanites as much as outback heroes. More so, in fact.

It dispenses with the old Discovery’s hefty combined monocoque and separate chassis set-up and moves to the same aluminium platform as the Range Rover and Range Rover Sport. This brings obvious benefits of scale for Land Rover in investment terms, but its primary benefit is in weight.

The new Discovery is a whopping 480kg lighter than the old one, which brings down the emissions and fuel consumption for every version, and will allow Land Rover to fit a new entry-level 2.0-litre ‘Ingenium’ four-cylinder diesel in 132 and 180kW forms, with CO2 figures as low as 159g/km. Even this big 3.0-litre V6 diesel, carried over more or less unchanged from the old Disco, drops to 189g/km and an average of 7.2L/100km.

Those seeking petrol refinement can plump for the supercharged 250kW V6, lifted from the Jaguar XF and F-TYPE, but even with the Weight Watchers card, you’ll pay for it – 254g/km and 10.9L/100km…

The 3.0-litre V6 diesel, with 190kW, feels wonderfully familiar though. It starts with a gentle grumble that soon subsides into the distant background, even when rumbling along forest tracks in low-range gears (a two-range gearbox will now be an option, one for serious off-roaders). It’s an exceptionally refined vehicle, more so even than the old one, which was hardly all that noisy inside.

The cabin is either warmly familiar if you’ve ever sat into a current Range Rover or Range Rover Sport or a bit disappointingly plain if you’ve stepped out of an Audi Q7 or BMW X5. It’s nice though – comfy seats, high quality materials and the new 10-inch InControl Touch Pro infotainment system, which is great to look at but not the easiest to use nor the most responsive of touch-screens.

Space is excellent though. Land Rover claims that there’s room for full-sized adults in each row of the seven-seat cabin and it seems so. There’s lounging room in the middle row even for six-footers.

Seven seats will be standard, but there’s also a little fold-out flap in the boot that allows you to sit and admire the view, or the sporting event, or just munch on a sandwich. It’s a replacement for the old Discovery’s split tailgate (now substituted by a big lift-up composite ‘gate) and it can hold up to 300kg.

It’s a nice little touch indicative of the obvious thought that has gone into how the Discovery functions. There are electric folding rear seats (operable from a smartphone app if you like), extra hidden storage areas in the cabin (behind the heater controls and under the cupholders), an optional chilled box in the centre armrest and the inimitable ‘curry hook’ for bringing home a take-away.

Other touches are more fundamental, like the high-set driving position that still allows you to see the corners of the sleeker bonnet, the sheer seat comfort and the tight turning circle (for a big, five-metre-long car anyway).

And then there’s the unstoppable nature of the Discovery in its natural element – the outdoors.

Unseasonable warm weather had turned the Blair Atholl estate (all 15,000 acres of it) from crisp and frost-bound to damp, misty and incredibly muddy. All of the tracks through the forest and up and over the glens had the surface consistency of melted chocolate and the going was as slippy as it gets.

The Discovery pressed on regardless. It is an exceptionally effortless machine to drive, even when all around you is mud, rocks, trees and the occasional precipitous drop.

Even clambering over a field of jagged boulders couldn’t upset the Disco’s composure, and its steering is just right – slow enough for precise off-roading, but with lovely weight and just a hint of surface feedback. Will it prove as sweet on the road? Probably.

The optional air suspension seems to be a touch mixed. It felt much firmer and crashier in the 3.0-litre V6 petrol model we sampled than it did on the much smoother diesel, but alloy wheel and tyre choice could be equally to blame and it’s hard to assess such things when the nearest smooth surface is several kilometres away. We’ll just have to wait and see.

What’s not in question is the Discovery’s exceptional toughness even when things go very wrong. An errant shard of Scottish flint did for the left front tyre on a lonely stretch of hillside, deflating and shredding the rubber and leaving the alloy wheel exposed.

One of Land Rover’s ever-helpful instructors said we should drive on to find more level, less boggy ground and so we had to, our progress marked by horrible scraping and graunching noises as our now-tripod Discovery limped forward.

But it did keep going. Even over more mud, ruts, rocks and stones for more than a kilometre until we found flat, stable ground. Many other cars would most certainly have wilted at that point. Many other cars are simply not this impressive, though.

The Discovery is big, for certain, but it’s also big-hearted.

Price: TBC
On sale: July 2017
Engine: 3.0-litre V6 turbo-diesel
Output: 190kW/600Nm
Transmission: Eight-speed automatic
Fuel: 7.2L/100km
CO2: 189g/km
Safety rating: Not tested

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