Gadgetory

you know you're in trouble when a new model comes to market raving about its lap time around the Nurburgring that most enduring of irrelevance II is to the average car buyer this one does exactly that but also a lot more let's drive this all-new 15 now the key thing to bear in mind about a Range Rover Sport is that it's not the sport version of a Range Rover a Range Rover Sport is its own distinct model and it carries some of the design cues from the Evoque particularly what they call this diminishing diello it's the side windows that get narrower as you go to the back of the card when car makers make a hotter car they always give it a more aggressive chin with bigger holes in it to get air in different wheels you get some lower body cladding here and out back you got four exhaust pipes that are very nicely chiseled and what they call a splitter for airflow management down the middle this is the first of a new line of cars from Land Rover that are kind of like BMW M if you will they come from the special vehicle operation of Land Rover but Ford already has a trademark on SVO so there s vo is badge SVR now Range Rover for that matter Land Rover interiors I'm always struck me as some of the most handsome it's a great layout ergo is good handsomeness is everywhere yeah I could do without this two-tone stuff you also notice we have pseudo sports pseudo racing seats in both the front row and in the back row because those and movable headrests are always there it can make it a little hard to put back seats down so that's a bit of a sacrifice for sport pretension versus practicality and as you can see the fold flat is kind of pseudo flat this is not optimized for cargo nor is there a third row available and we've seen this head unit before in jag Land Rover products it's a unique interface to them one of my biggest gripes is the slowness of its touchscreen response and the fact that you have to do voice input of navigation destinations in little itty-bitty pieces two three five two three I mean just compare how fast it is to tell your phone to take you somewhere and to tell this thing to do so ok Google Drive to 235 second Street San Francisco California my third gripe is how many screens interrupt what you're seeing here I can't tell any warning or notification screens like God could just blot out what's on the main screen that I care about and even when I turn the volume knob after a moment or two it brings up a confirmation screen that I don't need my ears tell me how loud it is that just gets in the way of what I care about and again overlaying all of this is so much lag and delay it's not measured in seconds parts of seconds but that's not okay in a car much brighter spot is up here in the upper left in control apps now here's where you get an apps platform you can decide what you want on which of these screens very much like you do on your phone or your tablet and it's all managed here through the Jag in control apps app on your phone that is very much a projector app to get things here up here but obviously not your whole phone their own curated basket the apps all come from this control panel on your phone you've got some new ones that are called out here like RTO and glimpse or apparently recent you can add cynic navigation if you don't like what Land Rover's got as well as a few other apps most of which aren't exactly globally famous and then down here you can see the ones I do have installed like parka pedia stitcher are do and this is where you set up the layout of your apps on the car these are flip through screens on the vehicle I mock them up here first and then they get pushed out to the car now the cameras on this vehicle are interesting you've got a variety of views and settings parked right now I've got the junction view I also have a curb view that looks out to the sides off the front wings I can set up new combinations of cameras that you don't see on any other car so they're very camera centric on this vehicle too bad that camera in the rear at least is so awful cuz it's so bad I'm pretty sure it's defective and I'm not gonna knock it because nobody would ship a camera with that bad registration of colors and fuzziness into a production car now up here in the engine bay is some fairly familiar jag Land Rover stuff a five-litre supercharged v8 but because you got an SVR badge on it it puts out more 550 horse that's 40 more than without that badge 41 more pound feet of torque gives you up to 502 and of course it goes out to an 8-speed automatic only but it's a sport automatic with faster shifts and that powers all four wheels either in a trackage mode or in an off-road mode depending where you have your terrain response knobs set now this vehicles heavy 50 100 pounds despite the extensive use of aluminum still gets up to 60 though in four and a half seconds or better so where do you give on the MPG of course it's rated at only fourteen nineteen but if you're buying a vehicle like this you didn't buy it in a shootout between it freeze your the first thing that impressed me is I got in this Range Rover Sport SVR was not what it did when it moved but what it did when it comes to a stop this vehicle has the best auto start/stop technology every it starts the engine almost in the time it takes to lift off the brake pedal that's very nicely done and it helps you get the most out of that pretty poor mpg the next thing you notice is definitely about going any major car maker right now jag and Land Rover are obsessed with obnoxious exhaust systems and they're fun the power of course is four digits this Sport Automatic as they say is definitely tight it's quick all and the fundamental takeaway I get great this to one of the hot Connie hands or an x5m is it it's less severe and yet it handles like a very capable car when you press it though I imagine if I went head to head it's not as sharp as those two turbines okay let's price our Range Rover Sport SVR this is not gonna be a cheap date as you can imagine all in about 117 3 the way I would do it what they've done here in this category is to hit - I think more bases than their competition it's also a very comfortable daily driver not all the competitors are they can be high-strung and it's got serious off-road cred or cars driven see next aisle standing by now at CNET on cars.com click on the road