No petrol, long queue for new Discovery

Land Rover Australia will introduce its fifth-generation Discovery next month with an all-diesel line-up, saying its customers prefer turbo-diesel power.

The new L462-series Land Rover Discovery will arrive with a choice of three turbo-diesel engines, including Jaguar Land Rover's new Ingenium 2.0-litre four-cylinder units in two states of tune (132kW/430Nm and 177kW/500Nm), and a single-turbo 3.0-litre V6 diesel (190kW/600Nm).

But petrol power simply isn't on the radar.

Speaking to motoring.com.au at the launch of the new Discovery this week, Land Rover Australia managing director, Matthew Wiesner, said previous attempts to introduce petrol-powered models were unfavourably received.

"We've played with a supercharged-petrol in Discovery 4 for a while, in 2015, and effectively found our customers prefer diesel," Weisner explained.

"We sold around 2020 cars that year, three of them were petrol," he stated.

Weisner added that even if customer demand called for a petrol option the ability to supply would be virtually impossible, as Land Rover's Solihull plant is running close to capacity.

"Arguably, if we absolutely focussed on it and drove petrol harder, then maybe you'd get that (number) higher," he continued.

"But when demand is what it is for a diesel drivetrain, in a body that we're going to have challenging or restricted production of – especially through this launch phase, then there's not really the opportunity to push petrol drivetrains; especially when we are taking everything we can get with the diesel."

Locally, sales forecasts of the new Land Rover Discovery look promising.

Weisner said more than 600 pre-orders of the model had been taken, with a guaranteed supply of another 1400 Discoverys between now and the company's end of financial year in March 2018. But customers wanting a bespoke build may face a four-month wait.

"The order bank is pretty significant," he said. "The reality is with 600 orders locked away, and the steady production lines that we have, if you want to build a car to spec the wait is three to four months as a minimum expectation.

"We've got roughly 2000 cars coming into the country between now and the end of March [2018]. So we'll get a good proportion of them prior to December, roughly 1500, with the tail-end dribbling through over January, February and March."

Land Rover has sold more than 65,000 examples of the Discovery in Australia since first-generation sales began in 1991. Globally the number is roughly 1.2 million vehicles.

Year-to-date sales in Australia have fallen to just 227 units in anticipation of the new model, Land Rover finishing last year with fifth-in-segment sales of 2470.

The 2017 Land Rover Discovery is priced from $65,960 (plus on-road costs). It goes on sale locally from August 1.