Land Rover Birmingham

• Introduction  »
• Interior / Walk Around  »
• Driving Impressions  »
• Summary

Driving Impressions

We drove a Range Rover Sport HSE with the climate package, luxury package, surround camera system, and locking rear differential.

The HSE comes with the baseline 375-hp V8 engine and six-speed ZF automatic transmission, a combination that will hurl the 5500-pound truck from 0 to 60 mph in only 7.2 seconds, virtually the same performance as the old 4.2-liter supercharged engine, without the extra cost.

It's the first home-built engine for a Range Rover, shared with its Jaguar cousins, and it has been modified from the Jaguar design for off-road use. That means a deeper oil pan to keep lubrication continuous even at high body angles when off road. All of the electric motors, pulleys and bearings under the hood, plus the starter, alternator and air conditioning compressor, have been completely waterproofed, which is a good thing because the Sport is rated to travel through 27 inches of water.

The improved ZF six-speed automatic transmission shifts very quickly and quietly, up or down. If you opt for the Supercharged model, you get a Sport mode added to the transmission and paddle shifters added to the steering wheel. These last two features were not on our HSE, but we didn't miss them.

Land Rover developed the basic suspension and the adaptive damping shock absorbers for the Range Rover Sport on the famous Nordschleife, the northern loop of the Nurburgring circuit in Germany, and it shows through to the average driver on a twisty country road.

The 2010 model's Terrain Response system menu has a new Dynamic Response program added to the menu, specifically to tune the suspension for high-performance road use. In this mode, the body is lowered and the shocks stiffened. There is very little body roll for a hefty truck that rides this high off the ground and has a high center of gravity, and the air suspension system combines with the P255/50R19 all-season tires to yield a quiet, smooth ride even in horrible off-road conditions. Hill Descent Control is standard, and there are additional settings in the system for rock crawling and sand driving. Modifications to the front suspension have made the steering response crisper as well.

Brakes on the HSE have been upgraded to the outgoing Supercharged model's 14.2-inch ventilated front discs and four-piston calipers, with 13.8-inch ventilated rear discs and twin-piston calipers, and they perform extremely well, even when soaking wet from underwater maneuvers: powerful, progressive and smooth. The brakes are used by the dynamic stability control system and the Roll Stability Control system to keep the truck on its intended path whenever cornering speeds are too high for conditions (when it detects a skid, for example).

In highway cruise mode, the truck settles down, the engine purrs in the background until provoked, the suspension lowers the truck closer to the road surface, and this fierce off-roader turns into a quiet limousine that tracks on down the road with a minimum of fuss and driver input.

The Range Rover Sport is rated to pull a 7700-pound trailer, and it has a trailer stability control built into the chassis system.

Go to Summary