2010 Land Rover Range Rover HSE – Short Take Road Test « New and Used Car Listings

2010 Land Rover Range Rover HSE – Short Take Road Test

A Land Rover in suburban captivity seems a little like a caged lion at the zoo—bred for roaming the wild plains, but growing fat and slow and deprived of the adventure essential to its well-being. However, Rovers have adapted quite well to the life of leisure that most enjoy, while retaining and refining their legendary off-road potential.

One Refined Wild Man

Wanderlust aside, the calling card of the contemporary Range Rover is an opulent interior—particularly with the $4950 Luxury Interior package as outfitted on our tester. Several staffers referred to the Range Rover as an “off-road Rolls-Royce.” Gorgeous brown leather seats are trimmed in fat, beige piping, and the wood trim would make a beaver drool. Two thick, burled pillars flank the center stack, disappearing behind a swath of leather that holds the two central air vents and reemerging alongside the navigation screen. The front-corner air vents appear to each be housed in a full stump of walnut. Combine this interior with the regal sheetmetal and stately stance of the Range Rover, and driving it makes you feel like a tyrant in colonial Africa.

Beware, though: This Range Rover’s electronics might be the insidious plot of unruly subjects. The surround-camera package—part of the $1280 Vision Assist package—is supposed to operate similarly to Infiniti’s Around View monitor but only worked about three percent of the time. (Unless we actually were backing into a huge blue screen with a broken-camera icon on it, in which case, it was working fine.) We also had trouble with the digital instrument panel on our tester, which often randomly switched to full brightness at night and blinded us. It refused to obey the dimmer switch, so one editor’s solution was to turn the vehicle off—while in motion—and restart it.

On a sport-ute costing $79,275—with a number of high-dollar options, ours reached $92,655—the concept of quirky British electrical systems ceases to be quaint. We find it discomforting, then, that the Range Rover has gone to a fully digital IP. There is no physical tach, speedo, temp gauge, or fuel gauge; instead, there are just pictures of those readouts displayed on a screen. Before the vehicle is started, a brooding image of a dusky sky lives here. Perhaps this is to indicate an inbound storm of electronic headaches.

A Cheetah in a Straight Line, an Elephant in the Curves

Ascendant provincials may plot and plan, but at least the Range Rover can whisk the aristocracy away from almost any uprising, if not electrical gremlins. With 375 hp and equivalent lb-ft of torque, the 5.0-liter V-8 rushes this nearly three-ton truck to 60 mph in 6.4 seconds. After 14.9 seconds, the masses clamoring for your head will be a quarter-mile aft as you speed away at 95 mph. More important for use in the civilized world are the equally impressive 30-to-50- and 50-to-70-mph passing times of 3.4 and 4.7 seconds, respectively. For truly uncivil speeding, top speed is governed at 136 mph.

Should the road wend, the 73.9-inch-tall Rover is markedly less adept. It sways under cornering (and in windy conditions) exactly as much as it looks like it would—a lot. The steering wheel doesn’t offer the best feel, but it doesn’t have to. If the wheel is turned, you’re getting close to the limit. The skidpad was the one place it felt at all dreary; stability control was extremely intrusive and limited cornering to just 0.65 g, or roughly what a fully loaded UPS truck might muster.

Riding High on the Highway

For people really confused enough to want a Land Rover for attacking on-ramps, there’s the LR4-based Range Rover Sport. This “regular” Range Rover’s great strength is highway serenity. It tracks true, it’s comfortable, tire noise and wind rustle around the upright windshield are muted, and sightlines all around are excellent. Also, people get out of your way because they assume you are a foreign diplomat. For this reason, we recommend a dark paint color.

Sure, the permanent four-wheel drive, the height-adjustable suspension, and the myriad electronic functions to optimize rock hopping mean you could drive it to the top of Kilimanjaro—we totally aced a couple of really big mud puddles—but it’s also perfectly content pacing the boulevards and parking lots of suburbia. And if the need strikes you to liberate a couple of lions from the zoo and drive them to their natural habitat, few vehicles are more capable of getting you safely home—as long as you don’t need a functioning backup camera to get you there.