Published:
6 August 2024The pick of the engines is Range Rover's Ingenium six-cylinder diesel. In D350 trim it delivers 345bhp and 516lb ft, yet in normal driving you barely know it’s switched on.
Even when you ask a lot of this powertrain – and a fully fuelled weight of 2667kg as tested means you might need to – it’s smooth and unobtrusive.
From rest, two-up and fully gassed, it went from 0-60mph in 6.3sec – a little off the claim but a number that still means it’s a fast and capable machine. A smoothly responsive one, too, with easily selectable gear ratios if you opt to use the gearshift paddles yourself, and a long throttle travel with predictable kickdown if you opt to let the gearbox software do it for you.
In more relaxed driving, this is one of those cars where it’s usually unnoticeable which gear it’s adopting, and while there’s only so much the best software and hardware in the world can do about the fuel consumption of a car of this size, it does its best, adopting as high a gear as sensible without labouring the engine or harming the refinement. At a 70mph cruise, an eighth-gear ratio that means the engine is spinning over at just 1550rpm keeps it particularly unobtrusive.
The PHEVs are responsive and when the 3.0 petrol engine is zinging along, it’s doing it very quietly in the background, with just a little sporting edge to it. Things are more responsive if you pull the gearlever into ‘S’ rather than ‘D’ but the electric motor is there to assist anyway – you can just use throttle rather than have to pull gears to make progress.
