Why we’re running it: To see if the new Range Rover is all the car you will ever need
Month 3 - Month 2 - Month 1 - Specs
Life with a Range Rover: Month 3
The Range Rover is a fine match for the Goodwood car park- 25 July
The Range Rover’s previous keeper, whom I won’t name as he’s no longer of this parish, fitted it with off-road tyres in his last week at Autocar. Annoying for me, because I mostly drive on motorways, but I said a silent thanks last week when crossing an especially treacherous grass car park at Goodwood. Still, I reckon we’d have managed on smoother rubber... Felix Page
Mileage: 11,460
Punctures galore... - 7 July
I seem to be attracting slow punctures at an appalling rate. A few weeks ago it was our Audi E-tron GT, now it’s the Range Rover. It was laid low by a small screw, despite the fact it was wearing chunky all-season tyres. Pretty unlucky. I felt sorry for the Kwik Fit man doing the repair, because the wheel and tyre package must weigh close to 40kg.
Mileage: 8244
Life with a Range Rover: Month 2
Fancy driving someone else’s 5m-long, 2.2m-wide, £137k SUV in busy London? - 21 June
I've previously moaned in these pages about the disproportionately large footprint and needlessly lazy turning circle of my Ora Funky Cat (see right), but for all its flaws, it remains a much more sensible urban proposition than some of the towering tanks I see hurtling around London. Big cars just make no sense in a tight, busy city centre.
So when the keys to the Range Rover PHEV landed in my lap one Friday evening, I had harrowing visions of scraped alloys, warped bumpers and scuffed trim. At more than five metres long, at 2.2 metres wide and with a wheel base in which you could comfortably park a Smart Fortwo, this surely wasn't designed to be threaded between double-deckers and down high-kerbed one-way residential streets
But I needed something comfy, capacious and ICE-powered for a succession of long drives, so I did some spacial awareness exercises, checked a map of my commute for previously unnoticed width restrictions and took a deep breath.
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Given the use this vehicle has been put to in the first three months, and accepting that's pretty realistic, which is the better ownership proposition, the Range Rover or the Range Rover Sport? Serious question.
The fuel consumption figure is meaningless. How much of the test was done on battery power alone?
My old BMW 328Ci was faster on less than half the power. The petrol-only consumption of this thing will be horrendous, probably less than 20mpg
@Blue328
Your 328Ci (E46 used than nomenclature with the M52TUB28 motor) was not faster than 6.0s to 60... more like 7.1. You would have struggled to get more than 27mpg from it unless you drove everywhere at max 40mph in 5th...
Mine certainly didn't do any better than that, in spite of eco-friendly pepperpot-alloy rim sizes.
The battery-power issue for any PHEV is a legit issue when it comes to fuel economy, but with a range like that it's easy to see how the average drive on a full charge would result in such a figure. Blasting along the entire M40 at 70mph+ would, of course, produce a different result...
By faster I meant top speed. Mine had a non--turbo straight 6. I don't know how you drive but I was getting 34mpg on a mix of m-way, A roads and urban. And I don't hang around.
Having driven the P440e, yes the several hundred mpg figures are clearly mostly on electric, which with the bigger batteries is more achievable than before. Once you get on the motorway it's more likely that the engine (very quietly) kicks in, however, because this time it's an inline six that is more appropriate to the car than the previous four pot, economy isn't shocking. Starting in town, then dual carriageway, motorway and then in town again, I got 48mpg driving as I would normally. On a lnger run I'd expect less, but for a car of that size, I thought that was decent. And in all electric mode it's so quiet, suits the car perfectly.
I had an E46 330Ci many moons ago and could get mid 30's mpg without trying very hard.
In your review, please can you explicitly investigate insurance costs. I live in London, and this year the costs to insurance my 2014 Autobiography L405 Range Rover have tripled versus last year. This is despite my adding an S5-class after-market immobiliser. My insurance agent told me that most insurers now won't touch Range Rovers if you live in London - even the new one - due to the rate at which they are stolen and shipped overseas. I currently have a new Audi on order for July delivery. Despite costing a lot of money the insurance costs are predicted to be one quarter of those for the nine-year-old RR. I love my RR, and was planning to replace it with the new plug-in variant you have reviewed, but no more. Setting aside the arguements against owning a RR in London, if JLR can't sort this out they are going to lose a lot of customers.