This is a great year for people shopping in the premium SUV market. Rarely has your dollar gone further, and the prestige brands are pulling out all the stops to get you into their high-riding models—and not into the competition.
Land Rover have landed on a brilliant formula for doing just that. The new medium-sized Discovery Sport last year is proving a favourite across a whole range of demographics. Why? The British brand is positioning themselves as an all-round lifestyle label. Australians love the idea of rugged but refined motoring – cars that can do active outdoors on the weekend and urban chic on the weeknights. Range Rovers have done it for years, but it’s the $50-80,000 Discovery Sport that is doing serious heavy lifting.
And heavy lifting it is: Land Rover’s sales have surged 50% over last year and the green badge is becoming an eye-catching must-have proposition.
But is the Discovery Sport any good?
The car it replaced—the Freelander—was nothing to get excited about. The new model may wear a new name and turn heads with its Evoque-like design, but we were keen to find out whether the new Land Rover’s talents were more than skin deep.
So we grabbed the keys to a 2016 Land Rover Discovery Sport Si4—the $59,000 turbo petrol model—and hit the road for the Easter long weekend. The destination was Byron Bay, almost a thousand kilometres north of our offices in North Sydney. In store for the baby Disco was a week of country driving, off-roading and ferrying the boys around the beaches and towns of NSW’s Northern Rivers.
