Land Rover Range Rover Sport Supercharged
Range Rover Sport is another one of those four wheel drives
that is never destined to go off road.
Ever. 
Low profile street tyres.
Fancy paintwork and easily
messed interiors are hardly the
recipe for extreme adventure.
Neither is a fuel range of about 7
trips around the block. There is a
price to be paid for enjoying the
verve of a 5 litre supercharged mill
putting out 375Kw and 625Nm of
torque. If you want to take over 2
½ tons of car from 0-100 in 6.2
seconds, you pay at the pumps.
A certainty in this game of writing about all things automotive, is the unfortunate point that all aspiring motoring hacks become jaded about new cars. So it has a left handed doodlewhatsit? They added 10 more kilowatts? Leonardo Da Vinci's great great grandson's step-son's mother in law's first cousin designed the doorhandles? You can be sure that the only 'ooh's' and 'ah's' will be from that fresh faced kid in the back row. Not many cars will have you going, “Shit, I want one” and “how much would the payments be, how long before they notice I am not paying the bond?” This is a comfortable place to be.
Well appointed, cleverly designed and cool. This kind of mass of machine should be a pig to hussle rapidly along. Thing is, it isn't. Somehow those engineers have wrought a beast that feels agile and nimble. Where the Range Rover is a luxury barge that can hurtle you shockingly fast, the Supercharged Sport feels lithe. Predatory. The Supercharged SLK that decided to blow me off with a flick of his throttle, was left in a state of slack-jawed awe as I effortlessly left him in my substantial wake. Up until that moment I never got the point of big cars pretending to be sports cars. They never are. Want a sports car?
Buy something lightweight with a good power to weight ratio. This changed my perception. Growing family needs preventing 2 seater bliss? Few spacewagons have anything close to this beauty's supple sprightliness.
The six speed auto is perfectly matched to the seemingly depthless pool of available torque and power with quick changes and the ability to hold a gear, never going all American-nany on you. Right up to the red line. A true pleasure. The clever adaptive damping and electronic assistance make the pothole-dissolving suspension a pleasure to hustle up your favourite twisted pass.
It ends up feeling much quicker than it actually is. It is certainly way beyond anything the laws of our universe, or at least the few Newton bequeathed us, ought by right to be.
Fuel consumption, is unfortunately in the “well, if you need to ask…” category. In the right colour it doesn't make you feel like you finally made it in the drug underground or rap music business. The metallic “Barley Blue” of my test vehicle is a stunner; accentuating the lines, rich looking somehow without appearing too ostentatious. The interior boasts 50% fewer switches, and the touch screen is finally a pleasure; unfortunately the SatNav is still not up to scratch, and I resorted to the Garmin on my Blackberry for an awkward trip. The iPod enabled sound system is superb. The killer item for me is the autoheadlamps.
When on a dark road, brights come on automatically and dip by themselves should a car come towards you. So cool In summary, marry into a family that owns their own oil-fields, sell a member of your new family that you don't like too much and make the downpayment.
