Land Rover Discovery Sport to go electric

The current-generation Land Rover Discovery Sport will get the most thorough and comprehensive facelift since its inception, carsales.com.au can exclusively reveal.

According to Jaguar Land Rover vehicle program boss, Pete Simkin, the mild update of the Discovery Sport's styling belies an SUV that gets an all-new platform, powertrain and electrical architecture.

"It sounds strange, but it's true - the next facelifted Discovery Sport is mostly new," he said.

The reason for the massive investment in the current five-year-old SUV, claims Simkin, is the desperate need to introduce the car-maker's new 48-volt mild hybrid and full plug-in hybrid powertrains for it to be successful in Europe and China.

This posed a huge problem for engineers.

The ancient Ford-legacy D8 platform that underpins the current SUV couldn't be engineered or adapted for the CO2-saving tech, triggering one of the most improbable engineering solutions of all time.

In the end, engineers decided to drop the old car's body on Jaguar Land Rover's all-new Premium Transverse Architecture (PTA).

The result can be seen here in fresh spy images from the UK.

Simkin oversaw the development of the new platform, which recently made its debut on the second installment of the Range Rover Evoque. He admits there was some complexity in switching platforms on an existing car.

In fact, so difficult was the task engineers faced, the all-new PTA architecture had to be developed, designed and engineered from day one with the old Discovery Sport in mind.

This is because it was vital to ensure the new underpinning's hard points matched the old D8 platform to enable the old body to 'mate' successfully with the monocoque.

Although the successor is 90 per cent new, it was decided early on that shortening the current Discovery Sport's lifespan wasn't a consideration.

Instead, Land Rover bosses decided the new, second-generation Discovery Sport will be introduced in a "couple of years".

That means the impending Discovery Sport will actually be a mild facelift.

Speaking of the considerable challenges involved with the Discovery Sport facelift, Simkins said: "We might be the first but we won't be the last to do this sort of thing. It just goes to show you what considerable pressure car-makers are under to reduce emissions and the engineering solutions we are resorting to slash CO2."

As well as introducing the hybrid powertrains, the new platform will allow lots of all-new tech to debut on the facelifted Discovery Sport.

Features like semi-autonomous driving assistance and advanced off-road driving aids, or the Evoque's handy Clearsight Ground view that employs two cameras in the door mirrors and another in the grille to provide an image that helps you ‘see’ through the bonnet to the front wheels to traverse difficult obstacles.

It's not yet known if Jaguar's E-PACE, introduced in 2017, will also switch architectures in the pursuit of lower emissions.