Range Rover Sport long-term test: report 2
This luxury SUV aims to blend the opulence of the latest Range Rover with a sharper drive, but does it succeed? We're living with a nearly new example to find out...
The car Used Range Rover Sport D350 Autobiography Run by Steve Huntingford, editor
Why it’s here To see if the full-sized Range Rover's sportier sister feels as special as it should during everyday use
Needs to Offer the comfort, refinement and general wow factor that you'd expect from a £100k luxury SUV, while mixing in the driving fun you wouldn't
Mileage on arrival 6200 Mileage now 7200 List price when new (2022) £99,245 Price new with options £100,790 Value on arrival £100,186 Test economy 28.6mpg Official economy 36.7mpg
3 September 2023 - A small break in a big car
With the end of the school holidays fast approaching and the weather forecast looking favourable, the Huntingford clan recently accepted an invite from friends to come and stay overnight and then spend a day at the beach near their house.
A few years ago, our luggage for this sort of trip wouldn’t have provided much of a test for a rucksack, let alone a large SUV. But that was before my wife and I added our daughter and a dog to our ensemble.
Fortunately, there are large SUVs and then there’s my Range Rover Sport – a car with a boot that’s absolutely huge. In fact, despite us apparently needing six bags worth of stuff, this took up only about half of the space on offer.
We actually ended up deploying the divider that folds up from the boot floor to split the luggage area in two, with this not only holding everything behind it in place, but doubling as a backrest when we parked and turned the mouth of the boot into a bench seat.
The Range Rover Sport’s considerable width also came in handy, allowing my wife to sit in the back alongside our daughter (in her child seat) and the dog (wearing a harness and settled on her favourite cushion) without feeling squashed.
True, that width was less welcome on the single-track roads near our destination. But you sit so high in the Sport that I was often able to see over the hedgerows, and so had plenty of warning when something was coming the other way and I needed to find a passing point.
The final test of the car’s abilities on this trip was the long drive home. And here its supple ride, combined with the fact we were all feeling pretty wiped by that point, put everyone in the back to sleep in short order.
As for me up front, I was grateful to be able to set the adaptive cruise control to make the driving as effortless as possible, and turn down the temperature on my ventilated seat to help me remain alert.
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