Land Rover to halt Discovery sales

Land Rover won't be able to sell you a Discovery, its third most popular model, for up to six months next year after stocks of the existing model run out as soon as February.

The prolonged showroom hiatus of Australia's fourth best selling large luxury SUV is due to both demand for the outgoing model and the delayed arrival of its replacement, which had been due on sale here in May but now won't arrival until July at the earliest.

With sales of all Land Rover models except the discontinued Defender up this year and Jaguar sales booming by 172 per cent on the back of the all-new F-PACE SUV and XE sedan, JLR Australia managing director Matthew Wiesner rates the lack of Discovery stock as the single biggest challenge facing the company.

"Our biggest challenge is the gap for Discovery," said Wiesner at this week's launch of the new Range Rover Evoque Convertible. "Our focus is to manage that."

Wiesner said less than 300 examples of the Discovery 4 remain in dealer stock, meaning supplies will run out within a few months.

"We're going to have a bit of a gap before the new model arrives," he said. "By February-March the current model will be gone, so there will be a period of time where we will be without Discovery."

Discovery sales are up three per cent to September 2016, with 2142 sales ranking it behind only the smaller Discovery Sport (3314) and Range Rover Sport (2364) for Land Rover sales, and behind only the BMW X5 (3394), the Rangie Sport and Audi's new Q7 (2178) in the large SUV over $70,000 sales segment.

Wiesner said JLRA has received about 200 pre-orders for the new Discovery 5, which has also attracted about 2500 expressions of interest, exceeding company expectations and amounting to about a full year's sales.

As we've reported, when the fifth-generation Disco arrives in July, pricing will start at $81,950 plus on-road costs for the seven-seat, four-cylinder  SE TD4 – significantly more than the existing entry-level Discovery 4 TDV6 ($64,935 plus ORCs).

However, three engines (Ingenium TD4 and SD4 four-cylinder turbo-diesel, and 3.0-litre TD6) and three specification levels (SE, HSE and HSE Luxury) will eventually be offered, tripling the number of variants to nine.

In addition, contrary to our previous intel, we now understand that when the full range of new Disco 5 models is on sale here by the end of 2017, a new entry-level Discovery S model will open the range at a similar base price point as before.

As well, although all Discovery 5s will initially come with seven seats, for which 95 per cent of buyers opt, all versions will eventually be available with just five seats, further lowering their pricetags.

A First Edition will be offered at launch, with Australia snaffling around 100 examples of the cosmetically enhanced and up-specced global run of 2400.

For the record, all Disco 5s will come standard with a ZF eight-speed automatic transmission and Land Rover’s Terrain Response 2 4WD system, but no low-range gear ratios.

The new model will, however, retain its 3500kg braked towing capacity.

And, although the cheapest Discovery 5 models will return to four-cylinder power for the first time since the 1990, resulting in less power and torque, weight savings of up to 480kg from a new aluminium-intensive monocoque platform will make all models quicker and more efficient.