Supercharged Range Rover
By Nigel Moll - October 1, 2008
To a car driver deprived of his view of the road ahead, an SUV hogging the left lane is hardly a welcome sight. The longer it sits there, the more deeply the car driver ponders its often wasteful bulk, its appetite for gasoline and how brilliant it would be to confine these bloated conveyances to their own clogged stream over there on the far right. Who could possibly love an SUV? The people perched high driving them, that’s who.
The vista from the bridge of the 1996 GMC Suburban we used to own was splendid, and the vehicle never failed to accommodate all we could stuff into its cavernous cabin or attach to its hitch. To Nova Scotia, it carried four people and two weeks’ vacation supplies; on the way back home, we also loaded a few Maine purchases–two Adirondack chairs and a large copper heron weathervane and its roof-peak cupolas.
But the driver in me could never warm to the heaving and swaying and ponderous motivation that accompanied the Suburban’s progress across the landscape. Later models are more car-like in their handling, but ours was a truck–a truck with carpet, three rows of leather seats and a big wayback area for dogs, coolers, lacrosse gear and the Christmas tree, but a truck nonetheless. The vehicle suffered two catastrophic transmission failures, although both times it at least had the decency to expire on our driveway. A 42-gallon tank encouraged its drinking problem, in the mid-teens for mpg.
How does this tale of life with an old Suburban relate to the vehicle at hand here? While not as capacious, the supercharged Range Rover has none of the performance shortcomings of the GMC behemoth I used to live with. For our GMC, SUV stood for serious utility vehicle. The Range Rover, on the other hand, excels as a high-rise sports sedan that can tackle a broad menu of tasks, from swift highway hauling for up to five people to absorbing speed bumps, from fording a streambed in Big Bend country to clambering over rhino dung and bleached bones on the plains of Africa.
Like a Rolls-Royce Phantom, the Range Rover has air suspension for a poised but silken ride on the highway but also, unlike the Roller, for absorbing punishing wilderness terrain. The Range Rover’s off-road capabilities warrant a sizeable section in the owner’s manual, and they will go to waste without due scrutiny of the book, which explains exactly what all the terrain switches and icons in the vehicle mean.
For example, in the center console is a “terrain response” thumbwheel with five settings: general, for typical road surfaces; grass gravel snow, for firm but slippery surfaces, including ice; mud ruts, for soft, muddy, uneven or deeply rutted ground; sand, for soft, predominantly dry, yielding, sandy ground such as dunes and desert; and rock crawl, selectable only in transfer LOW range and suitable for crossing wet or dry, solid, unyielding ground requiring extreme wheel displacement, such as clusters of boulders or rocky river beds.
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