2015 Land Rover Discovery Sport first drive

People will tell you that the new Land Rover Discovery Sport is a replacement for the Freelander, but there’s far more to it than that. 

It is certainly another Halewood-built off-roader, and a £30k-£40k rival for the BMW X3 and Volvo XC60, but Land Rover has made it longer, fitted five-plus-two seating to its more spacious cabin, borrowed the styling heavily from the Evoque and redefined it as a member of the emerging Discovery family which stresses its versatility and practicality.

Even Gerry McGovern, Land Rover’s design boss and the chief architect of the new model’s sleek new shape agrees. “Others have great design,” he told us. “But Land Rovers need class-leading functionality."

There’s an interesting back-story about the Sport’s arrival. Land Rover’s range of 4x4s has come to be dominated by the Evoque, whose annual sales of 120,000 a year are more than double the originally planned volume.

The Freelander, closely related to the Evoque under the skin, was in danger of being glossed over, not least because its name has little cachet in the US or China. The company also need a more modern-looking model that could fight and beat the X3 and XC60 while continuing to use existing manufacturing processes and share many common components. Enter the Disco Sport.

Though closely related, the Sport is far from identical to an Evoque under the skin. It has the same front suspension and transverse-engined mechanical layout and the steel chassis is nearly identical back to the B-pillar, but there’s a completely new rear structure that extends the Sport’s length (by 91mm) and wheelbase (by 80mm) and introduces a sophisticated new multi-link rear suspension which, along with the extra length, helps preserve interior space.

This means the Sport’s second row of seats can move back and forth, either to make a huge boot or provide class-leading second-row kneeroom close to that of a Range Rover. 

For the first six to eight months of production, the only engine option will be the 188bhp SD4 diesel familiar from the Evoque and Freelander, and also shared with PSA and Ford. This was in our test car, driving through ZF’s silky nine-speed automatic gearbox. Traction has been enhanced by continued improvements to the Terrain Response system that configures throttle, gear selection, torque distribution and ABS/traction control in four different modes according to driving conditions. 

In less than a year’s time the Sport will adopt JLR’s advanced four-cylinder engine range made in its new Wolverhampton works, a move that should improve fuel consumption and cut CO2 emissions. At that stage a two-wheel-drive version will become available, and the entry price will drop from today’s £32,395 for a base manual model to just under £30,000 for the two-wheel-drive version. 

Two things strike you immediately when you slide behind the wheel of the Discovery Sport. One is that there are no reminders of the Freelander; the other is that without aping anything they’ve done already, the design team have made this an obvious Land Rover. Not a Range Rover, a Land Rover.

It’s nicely appointed rather than outright plush. There are three green elliptical badges visible and the theme is logic, not luxury. True, there’s a big centre screen that introduces a new infotainment system, but even that offers new levels of remote-control versatility without making an exhibition of itself.