Smarter Car Choices!

When Rover engineers Gordon Bashford and Spen King delivered the original Range Rover in 1970, they can’t have had any idea how important a car it was. Land Rover’s various owners would spend the next 50 years exploring the potential of the Range Rover badge, and JLR continues to do so today. Which brings us to the subject of this review, the new Range Rover Sport SV.

A slightly different take on the idea of a range-topping, ultra-desirable Range Rover Sport, it comes to us almost a decade to the day since the debut of its immediate predecessor at Pebble Beach in 2014: the Range Rover Sport SVR.

Packed full of visual and vocal attitude, that hot Range Rover – the ‘494 RS’, as Land Rover engineers knew it – was emblematic of JLR’s Special Vehicle Operations division at its most performance-fevered peak. It came along just a few years before Jaguar’s wild Project 7 roadster and Project 8 super-saloon specials and represented JLR reaching into Porsche and Mercedes-AMG territory.

But the new Range Rover Sport SV seems to strike out in a different direction again. Rather than putting outright on-road performance and handling at the core of its mission, this special derivative is designed to be a better and more desirable kind of Range Rover in a much broader sense.

It has been engineered like no other high-performance product in the Range Rover brand’s history but is intended to stand out just as clearly for its refinement, luxuriousness and Range Rover-typical reductive design appeal.

Design, interior & technology

The SV version only heightens the luxurious feel of the Range Rover Sport, with its sportier feel and innovative materials

The interior of a modern Range Rover has long been one of its highlights, and that’s the case here with the SV, too. Climb up into the driver’s seat and you’ll notice there’s a particular level of opulence that takes it over and above many of its German rivals; even if the overall build quality isn’t quite as solid. 

Materials on the SV are at Bentley levels of luxury; the leather is soft and supple, metal work cool to the touch and finished in a darkened chrome. There’s also lots of SV-specific materials to enjoy, too, including a bespoke chopped carbon finish – a matte-finish weave is also available – clear acrylic on the steering wheel-mounted paddles and SV button, and a clever 3D woven material on the seat backrests. 

In fact, those seats come with a Range Rover-specific oddity that is an almost complete lack of lower bolstering. This is due to the car’s high ride height, allowing for ingress and egress, but they do compromise on lower-thigh support. We also didn’t find them to be quite as comfortable in general as the best seats in the business, but their integrated massage function is one of the more effective in the luxury SUV class. 

One seemingly minor, but actually rather important, touchpoint that doesn’t present so well is the gear selector. As with all SV Range Rover variants, it’s made from a faux porcelain finish that comes across more as cheap hard plastic than something you’d find in the Selfridges homewares department. Add to this the light and cheap-feeling mechanism of the shifter itself and it results in a fairly cruddy touchpoint that you come into contact with every time you set off and come to a stop. What’s the Range Rover Sport like inside?

You’re more cocooned in the Sport than you are in the full-sized Range Rover – with a lower seating position, higher beltline and controls positioned higher up on the centre console. Build and layout are much the same, though.

You get superb seats with as many degrees of adjustability as you could reasonably ask for, swathed in interesting Ultrafabrics on all the cars we sampled. These feel rather like grippier leather, though contain no cow whatsoever. Leather as a premium material became rather passé the moment Kia began doing it, anyway – there’s no question that these alternatives feel suitably posh and supremely comfortable.

The biggest improvement over the previous car has to be space. While the boot’s still only average (though that’s due in part to the highly useful full-sized spare wheel cavity) there’s now comfortable space for adults in the second row, something you couldn’t say about the last model. Our 6ft 2in tester could sit behind himself. It’s not entirely surprising that, given the two cars share a wheelbase, it feels similarly commodious to the full-sized Range Rover back here.

Back up front you’ll find a good-looking and well-laid out 13.7-inch driver information display and 13.1-inch infotainment touchscreen. Both work very well with quick responses and a logical, if slightly laborious layout of controls.

Specs

Price when new: £116,190
On sale in the UK: Now
Engine: 4.4-litre twin-turbocharged V8
Transmission: Eight-speed automatic, all-wheel drive
Performance: 4.3s 0-62mph, 155mph, 25.2mpg, 254 g/km
Weight / material: 2505kg
Dimensions (length/width/height in mm): 4946 / 2209 / 1820mm

The SVR had a V8 exhaust note that, at its wildest, could clear the outside lane of a motorway at a range of about 400 yards, but in line with the car’s wider transformation, the SV is at least marginally more demure.

In place of that fearsome supercharged bellow, you get a slightly higher-register V8 warble here – one less angry and spiky in character and more homogeneous and melodious, albeit (no doubt due to tougher emissions standards) more synthesised-sounding. In terms of the style and breadth of its delivery, this twin-turbocharged V8 offers plenty. It revs quite freely, all the way beyond 7000rpm when you need it to, and it empowers the SV to take off with real brutality from standing and through the lower gear ratios. Launch control starts certainly aren’t smooth, luxurious experiences. While the body resists squatting to extremes, each successive automatic gear change really tears through the driveline and makes your head rock back. That’s quite rare in a performance car with a torque-converter gearbox, but here the apparent tension and friction in a driveline with its fair share of locking differentials is clear to perceive.

There is, of course, abundant traction and forward momentum, too. This car is highly unlikely to leave you wanting more, but it recorded a 0-60mph time of 3.9sec in a class where we’ve seen Porsches and Lamborghinis dip well under 3.5sec in recent years – and where even quicker EVs now exist.

The Range Rover Sport SVR, for the record, managed it in 4.4sec. It’s a similar story in terms of roll-on acceleration. While the Urus we tested in 2019 got from 30-70mph in 2.8sec, the SV took 3.2sec.

Adaptability is a stronger calling card for this car’s powertrain than outright pace, however. In SV mode, the engine holds onto gears for longer and leaves drive engaged on the overrun as you close in on corners for a tangible sporting sense of purpose.

In its gentler moments, it can be a picture of remarkable silver-tongued smoothness and docility. And in JLR’s off-roading modes, the powertrain’s controls and responses are dulled a little, just as you would want them to be for the sake of the close management of momentum.

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