Land Rover Range Rover Sport Supercharged: Improved performance - before the pavement ends

摘要

FORD MOTOR COMPANY'S PRE-vious administration had a grand plan to make the company more profitable: Acquire high-ticket luxury car manufacturers and rake in the profits from their higher-margin products. Jaguar, Volvo, Aston Martin and the parent of this road test subject, Land Rover, were all scooped up. Phase one, complete. Unfortunately, the lottery-style windfall profits never materialized. It is said that Volvo has been the only consistently profitable brand of the group, while at the opposite end of the spectrum, Jaguar's total losses are measured in the hundreds of millions. But prospects are finally looking brighter as the other two British brands are on the upswing. Borrowing a page from Volkswagen's Bentley, Aston Martin's new entry-level exotic, the V8 Vantage (Road Test, November 2005 issue), looks to be a major hit. Likewise, Land Rover's top-flight Range Rover is selling briskly, and the dowdy Discovery has been replaced with the remarkably good LR3. Now the latest offering, the Range Rover Sport, should complete the trifecta. Visually, there's a lot to like about the new Range Rover Sport. Essentially a scaled-down Range Rover on Land Rover's LR3 platform, Big Daddy's lines look great at plus-or-minus 8/10ths size. What's more, the steeply sloped rear glass really does look sporty.