Gadgetory

this is it the last chunky square landrover sold in the North American market everything else is going kind of Sidda fide nice vehicles but this has got the essence the look let's drive this lr4 in the high-end luxe trim and check the tech now the LR 4 has that kind of look where you'd expect the Queen's security detail to come piling out at a stop sign with their MP fives barely hidden under their Savile Row jackets it's got that sort of combination of British handsomeness and capability the signature design feature on the lr 4 has to be those windows in between the C and D pillars on the sides they look like kind of a different interpretation of what a Vista Cruiser wagon used to have but unfortunately that rap over glass is just for looks there's basically bodywork up there at the top the lines are handsome and square and says I know what I'm doing off-road and caring up to seven people in the optional three row configuration the second and third rows fold more or less flat for the inevitable antiquing but do it from the front not the back or with power as some slick minivans do Batman would love this thing he could get his gobos in the puddle lamps the first you're going to notice about an lr4 is that it feels inside like it looks outside tall angular and airy this is a really cool greenhouse to be in which a lot of SUVs and crossovers are trending away from I wish this is a panoramic roof but it's not it's in two pieces and this glass moving part up here doesn't really get out of the way very much so it's a little bit frustrating in that respect now let's get to the main event the head unit with all of our infotainment function hello it's my old Palm Treo calling yeah what's up okay I'll pass that on yeah it wants its interface designer back this is what we call in the vernacular of the tech industry god-awful it's a very dated design it wastes a lot of space on chrome and lines and boxes it has a lot of dead space in it for example if you go to the radio I just want to see more information on what I'm listening to right now not a majority of kind of standard utility buttons that I may not use for minutes or hours lots of truncation of what I want to read the screen itself is small by today's standards especially on a pricey vehicle navigation navigation go to go to address navigation go to address please say the city name or say change search area San Francisco sorry okay you lost me at San Francisco as soon as a system wants information little onesie twosie buckets like that I know we're back in the 90s no thanks on the audio system you've got several levels of Meridian sound they've dumped Harman Kardon we have the high end system which is some 17 speakers and 800 plus watts your sources are all good you've got basically everything here you might want I've never been able to get the Bluetooth streaming to work maybe it's just my phone though no other card ever tested it has a problem with my phone but this one does beyond that you've got your USB and aux connection you can get a rear seat entertainment system that appears to be USB and mp4 biased not so much disc am/fm HD and satellite radio of course are all in here there's an EPS package called in control but our LR 4 is one year too old to have it 15s and later can pull up I Heart Radio glimpse for location sharing siddik offline navigation which is probably better than the factory rig and seldom seen choices like news onboard and mobile day they've moved the place where you plug in your portables from in the console and I'll show you why in a minute to one of the two glove boxes the upper one now has a little dock over there with your USB in your ox it's handy to have it up high on its own little bin unless you're driving alone in which case you can't reach it here's why the USB stuff isn't in the console anymore because we've got a little fridge in here you can turn that on keep things cool as you drive bigger organ onyx screw up once we turn the drive controls if you're a 6-footer like me there is actually no way you can lower the seat enough and raise the steering wheel enough to see the gauges I have lost everything between 1 and 6,000 rpm and I can't see anything between 50 and 110 miles an hour I think I would use those ranges in day-to-day driving if I could see them now your automatic transmission is one of these rise to your hand knobs that jag Land Rover is so big on you've also got shift paddles over here for your standard one choice automatic transmission we'll get to the powertrain in a minute under the hood over here is your terrain response system where you can dial in very simply a little pictogram of whatever kind of terrain challenge you are facing you've also got your height adjustment rear differential lock crawl control and whether or not you're going to be in high or low on your transfer case we have the optional two-speed transfer case they don't all come with it no longer a 5-liter v8 found up here now it's a much smaller 3 liter but supercharged v6 340 horsepower but only 332 pound-feet of torque I normally expect a supercharged engine of a very high torque number this one not really and it has to move over fifty six hundred pounds of British squared off tradition still it gets up to 60 and 7.7 seconds pretty respectable and does that through a one choice only 8-speed automatic where it used to have a six-speed Automatic nice improvement there as well and obviously these are all four-wheel-drive your mpg is rated at fourteen nineteen that really needs fourteen in everyday living pretty sure there is some efficiency tech here helping prop it up as much as it does that would include auto start-stop technology and brake energy regeneration to reduce some of the alternator lag but overall this is not light on the fuel or light on the pavement Lelaina this is a serious capable off-roader the ride quality is outstanding it's basically luxury car which is basically you have to do these days to play in this market at this price now power is power is kind of disconnected it's not the worst I've driven but there's no sharp throttle response here you get a burst of power a moment after you press the throttle that's more than you really want and then you're backing it off and reining it in so it's kind of a lumpy yo-yo II drive quality it's not too out of character with this kind of vehicle though and there is ample power and it's very linear once it does come on now in terms of visibility tech you've got blind spot monitoring I get indicators here in the mirror nothing active about it cross traffic alert in the back we have adaptive cruise control on this particular sample there's no forward collision tech though no warning or automatic braking and you can also get a surround camera as well as we have the sort of porpoise nose camera here that looks out left and right for when you're nosing out of a blind alley or something like that now I've got no place to really check out the off-road ability of this terrain response system here in urban Greater San Francisco but it's as you've seen easy to operate very straightforward and the air suspension can grant a big degree of additional lift here when you do go off-road I'm coming to a stop sign here let's see how the start/stop technology works off we go and now I'm gonna lift off the brake and it's actually among the quickest I've driven which would surprise you considering I'm comparing it to some fine German sporting sedans but this one fires quickly it's fairly unobtrusive and perhaps because of the sheer weight of the vehicle it doesn't shake the whole cabin so it's actually very satisfying you can get into an lr44 as little as about 50,000 and change but we've got the lux package so we're starting at about sixty one five then we add on the key options which start with the HD package if you want the serious two-speed transfer case satellite and HD radio are insultingly Alucard at seven hundred and fifty dollars for the package the apps suite is four hundred and thirty dollars afraid I couldn't test it and tell you if it's worth it adaptive cruise is thirteen hundred dollars but as I mentioned has no forward collision warning tech and vision assist which includes Auto high beams the blind spot and surround camera tech as well as that front Junction camera is sixteen hundred more all in you're looking at about sixty seven thousand dollars CNET style for a vehicle that's been dramatically modernized and refreshed as it comes into this model year and yet retains a certain traditional British