Gadgetory

for many the Land Rover Range Rover is the ultimate go anywhere do anything vehicle I mean there aren't many places on dry land that you can't get in a Range Rover with a little bit of patience and a lot of preparation but it's also a very refined vehicle on the inside that you can spray down at the end of a day of off-roading and valet park at the finest restaurant without the need to be embarrassed now this 2013 model takes a step closer towards refinement by moving from a truck based body-on-frame to a monocot unibody that's more car-like but in the process hasn't lost any of that off street cred I'm an squattin Goodwin let's take a look at this 2013 Land Rover Range Rover supercharged and try to find out now upfront here we've got new headlights that are more range rover evoque and fire and they wrap around and in the middle more closely integrate with the front grille I like that generally speaking though the proportions and lines of the vehicle are still classic Range Rover you'll definitely know that this is a rover when you see it going down the street you've got the classic front overhangs that are very short out back we've got a little bit of a longer overhang to make room for your space here in the back but you'll see the angle here is very steep because you still get those very good approach and departure angles when you actually want to take this thing off roads now underneath this clamshell hood we've got a five litre aluminium block v8 engine now by building the engine out of aluminum you save weight which is good because in the vehicle of this size every pound matters now on top of that engine we've got a supercharger that's for feeding it air through two intakes power is outputted at about 510 horsepower 461 pound-feet of torque that's nothing that's enough you know that it was interesting here is that if you look closely you can see also that we've got some of the pneumatic lines for the adaptive air suspension you've got the left rear the left front the right rear the right front everything is kind of compact and run off of the engine so when you raise and lower the height of the vehicle which we'll get to in a second you don't actually need a separate compressor now the EPA estimates that you'll get about 15 miles per gallon over a combined cycle and sideo highway I actually got 15.1 which now looks pretty good now power from that v8 engines gonna come through an 8-speed automatic transmission that you'll control with this knob right here it's the shift knob and it's interesting because it is actually a knob that you twist it rises up out of the center console when you power the vehicle up this is pretty much part spin Jaguar Land Rover stuff but I really like it you've also got paddle shifters here on the back of the steering wheel and it's interesting because with the menu here on the dashboard you can disable them when you're in the regular drive mode and don't want to be shifting around that's going to keep you from accidentally down shifting when you kind of just want to you know get around a parking structure I like that ability a little bit further down the center console we have all the controls for Land Rover's Terrain Response 2 system even automatic mode that pretty much handles and evaluates the road as you drive along and does all the shifting of power between front and rear left and right on its own when things get a little rocky or a little muddy you can hit that Auto button it'll pop up into a knob and from here you have the ability to select programs for different types of terrain you've got gravel and snow you've got rutted roads you've got sand you've also got rock climbing you put it in any of those modes and the LCD screen will tell you everything that you need to know about what kind of terrain you're on it'll also give you on-screen prompts of as far as any other settings that you may have to make that it can't automatically make additionally our vehicle is equipped with a air suspension system with four different levels of height adjustment the standard adjustment is which are going to drive around town in there's also an access mode that'll actually lower the vehicle down closer to the ground makes it easier to get into and out of and keeps you from scraping your roof when you go through parking structures there are also two off-road levels that will raise it up above the standard ride height for a little bit more ground clearance now in the dashboard we've got the hard drive based navigation system this too is also kind of parts bin Jaguar Land Rover it's pretty good not my favorite system in the world the graphics are good but the way the menus are set up a lot of the features that you would want to access on a daily basis such as searching for a destination searching for a gas station these things are hidden under multiple levels of menus what's not standard is our 19 speaker 825 watt Meridian surround sound stereo this is actually a pretty good system and I think it's worth the cost of entry you've also got a number of cameras on our vehicle which is equipped with the vision package that gives you a on the front of the vehicle a front facing camera that gives you 90 degree views in either direction from the front bumper which is good for when you're nosing out of a blind alley the problem with this system though is you've also got other cameras that are hidden under a menu you've got these sort of side curb cameras that kind of function like Neath on an infinitive bird's-eye view camera but you can't actually get to them unless you dive into a menu so our vehicle is also equipped with a comfort package that's going to add heated and cooled feet to the front row it's going to give you a three zone climate control and it's also going to add a massage function you can hop into a menu and then you've got to dive into another menu where you control intensity and you can set timers into different programs but it's a lot of button pressing on the screen when you should actually be driving now you may be tempted to enact a no food or drink from the car rule this is that nice of an interior but you may want to make an allowance for drinks so you can take advantage of the refrigerator in the center console the Range Rover supercharged is at home on the road but it is more at home off of the road we're going to do a little bit of that we're doing some grappling I really want to call this off-roading I know people whose driveways are rougher than this now again as I said the terrain management system its second generation and it's pretty much right now analyzing the ground below me so as like one wheel gets a little bit of slip one wheel kind of dips down into a rut it's constantly analyzing the road beneath me in order to give me the best available grip without me having to do a lot of fiddling around with different drive modes now terrain or the situation or anything it's too precarious I can actually select those individual drive modes to kind of get it sort of a preset of what it should expect to do so there is a lot to like about this vehicles off-road capabilities it just handles everything with stride and it handles all of these things again in its automatic mode now if I really wanted to kind of climb up a mountain or scramble up a gravelly Hill okay I actually still have those uh the the low transfer mode I can lots of differential I can do a lot of different things in order to kind of increase that but I think all the offered survivability of this vehicle and all of that is happening outside of the vehicle while inside I'm enjoying the massage seat the heated seating heated surface is the air conditioning I could be listening to the premium audio system I'm very isolated from everything that's happening outside of the fact that I'm getting kind of shaken around a little bit but you can't really be helped now it's a roll off of the lot in a brand new 2013 Range Rover supercharged it's gonna cost you about ninety nine thousand one hundred bucks that's before a $100.00 California emissions charge and about eight hundred and ninety five dollars in destinations charge now our example here has eleven thousand dollars worth of options added on top of that didn't misspeak eleven thousand dollars worth of options and that includes the cabin comfort package that's going to get you those heated seats the Meridian surround sound system a variety of upgrades including the around view camera system and it's going to bring you to an as-tested price of one hundred eleven thousand one hundred and twenty bucks now that's a lot of money definitely can't afford one of these but I'm gonna steal one when civilization Falls