I drove the 2015 Land Rover Range Rover Supercharged LWB
last week around New York, and I have nothing to report.
No arguments with garage attendants over whether or not they
“have room” to keep the big rig for the weekend. No inter-car gestures with
highway rowdies about who cut off whom on a blind spot along the FDR Drive. No
sweat involving the long-shot parallel park.
It’s a real problem when you’re trying to write a car
review. It’s also admirable, considering that this Rover is an expensive
tank.
Source: Land Rover via Bloomberg
Length, Heft
The LWB on this Range Rover stands for “long wheel base,”
123 inches long to be exact—10 inches longer than a Porsche Cayenne. It’s very
nearly as heavy as the 5,800-poundCadillac
Escalade, which is the largest in the class. And it’s coated in the
unmistakable veneer of wealth, with such upgrades as a $2,150 Premium Audio
sound system, $3,200 cooler box and massage seat packages, and a $1,300 towing
system, pushing the $107,000 base price to $121,000.
But rather than experiencing the anxiety typical of
driving large utility vehicles in tight city spaces, or the funny looks they
evoke from neighborhood busybodies in the more genteel parts of town, this
Supercharged Rover gives a solid, straightforward, stress-free ride.
In fact, its rectangular body lines are about as low-key as
you’ll get in a six-figure SUV, depending on the color combinations you choose
(mine was “Causeway Grey” outside, with an ebony interior and trim).
Source: Land Rover via Bloomberg
Its well-tightened chassis and instantaneous steering
response make driving it less about elbowing a bull around a china shop than
about smoking those truck drivers eyeballing you from across the stoplight.
(And yes, the ride height in this thing feels about even with the standard
U-Haul or UPS truck; I’m 5-feet, 10 inches and had to stepup in order to
get inside)
Class Considerations
Consider the Supercharged LWB against the $115,000
Mercedes-Benz G-Class, the $99,000 BMW
X5 M, and the $115,000 Porsche Cayenne Turbo. If you’re looking for
something that can hold its own around a racetrack but won’t embarrass you on a
muddy overland expedition, this’ll do.
Sure, those others will do, too—and well. The difference is
that this Rover will clean up as elegantly as the most proper British gent; the
styling pulls from decades of British design cues and therefore is more
traditional than the rounded back and sides of the Cayenne or the squat robotic
charm of the X5M. If you pay attention as you drive, you can still sense echoes
from the military trucks that were its forefathers—Tata Motors ownership notwithstanding.
Source: Land Rover via Bloomberg
Big Brawn
One surprise for its size: The engine is “only” a V8,
but supercharging gets it to 510 horsepower and 461 foot-pounds of torque,
which was more than enough to make me feel I could pretty much dominate anyone
I wanted along the West Side Highway. It’ll hit 60 miles per hour in 5.5
seconds, about the same as its competitors from Mercedes and BMW.
Pumping through its eight-speed paddle-shifters feels like
commanding a heavy souped-up speedboat. You hear the power initiate in the
center of the machine then feel it propel everything forward. If there’s one
thing you can say about the Range Rover Supercharged, it’s that it instills
supreme confidence among its drivers.
Source: Land Rover via Bloomberg
Such superiority does come at a cost: 14 miles per gallon in
the city and 19mpg on the highway fall to the poor side of the spectrum when
you consider that standard SUVs range from 13 to 28 combined mpg on average.
The engine has an automatic start/stop function that kills power when you press
the brake at a standstill—this saves gas you’d burn just waiting at lights—but
the efficiency results lack conviction.
Civilized Security
One of the things I like most about the Rover Supercharged
is that from behind the wheel I felt incredibly protected. The car comes
standard with front, side, and head curtain airbags, side-door impact beams,
power-operated child locks on all doors and windows, front and rear park
distance control, rear view cameras, and an anti-trip feature on the windows
and sunroof. Failing all that, the 24-hour Land Rover road recovery service
comes included.
Source: Land Rover via Bloomberg
It has permanent four-wheel drive and hill-descent control,
which I found particularly useful on some of the steeper inclines in the
East Village's more hidden parking garages. You probably won’t much notice
the enhanced air suspension system with multiple modes (access, standard,
off-road, and extended height) in city driving, but it’s a bonus that places
this SUV in off-road-capable territory, despite its luxury pedigree.
There’re plenty of other fun things to get, too. Why not?
You might as well go all-in.
For an additional $1,760, you get a Vision Assist
package with blind-spot monitoring and rear traffic alerts, among other things;
for a further $1,560, you get a Driver Assist package that includes a lane
departure warning system that can identify street signs, along with a system
specifically developed for flawless parallel parking. These run just slightly
more expensive than the options you’d find in some of the aforementioned
competitors, but I recommend getting them because otherwise, the interior of
the Rover can seem a bit stark. Plus it completes the idea that when you drive
this thing, you’re untouchable.
Everything behind the front two seats feels
cavernous—conversations between the front and rear seats require the diaphragm
boom of a Southern preacher to be heard—though in terms of actual creature
comforts such as climate control, heated power seating, and the extended
panoramic sunroof, it’s really no different from the $63,000 Range Rover Sport.
You spend the extra dough on this version for the extra space, not for anything
particularly exclusive behind the wheel.
That said, it has the well-made feel of
maximum, premium utility. It’s the perfect buy for tall millionaires
(Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Andre Iguodala, I’m looking at you), although I
almost wish that for that much room and price, it could hold more than five people
max (four with an optional center-back console). Solid leather seats are heated
front and rear; fine strips of mood lighting along the sides and auto dim bulbs
refine what could otherwise come off as almost Soviet starkness. All doors are
calibrated to a perfect soft thud when they close; the rear tailgate
unfolds like origami with the touch of a button.
Source: Land Rover via Bloomberg
I loved using those tailgates. They open up to an enormous
trunk space adequate for weeks' worth of jet set caliber luggage, but they also
allow for civilized living (nothing so crass as slamming the trunk here). Plus,
they’re beautiful to watch operate. I loaded a massive cow-hide into mine. It’s
a long story.
Those doors say a lot about the nature of this bull,
come to think of it. The Range Rover Supercharged is big and bulky, yes, but it
has an innate grace. It remembers its manners.
source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-19/range-rover-supercharged-lwb-review-the-121-000-gentleman-s-tank
by Hannah Elliott
http://www.boscheuropean.com
No comments:
Post a Comment