Land Rover Range Rover Sport review

You’ve not seen this much screen real estate since you were last in Curry’s. The Range Rover Sport inherited the same interfaces bequeathed to the now-usurped Range Rover by the upstart new Velar, which you can read all about here. So, it’s a 12.3-inch digital screen for instruments – vastly improved in clarity and configurability – and two 10-inch touchscreens in the middle known as the Touch Pro Duo infotainment system.

The media/nav display up top is still off the pace of BMW iDrive and Audi MM. The glassy screen can be slow to react and it often succumbs to freezing when asked to multitask.

Land Rover still appreciates that physical controls are easier to use on the move than featureless glass though, so the lower section – a giganto-pane which incorporates drive settings, climate control and the like – features two rotating knobs which adjust cabin heating and heated seats, and can alter off-road modes too, should you have ticked the relevant boxes. It’s a well-rendered, well-executed section of interior design, though we remain convinced that good as a touchscreen can be, it’ll never be as user-friendly hands-free as tactile buttons and switches. That’s minimalist design for you…

The back seats offer plenty of headroom but it’s not huge in terms of legroom – adequate rather than enormous. You’ll easily seat three across the rear bench, but we’ve found the ISOFIX mountings very tricky to access, what with Land Rover’s penchant for very tightly-packed leather. The rearmost two seats are a child-only zone, but their very presence is welcome versus this car’s five-seat only predecessor. Worth noting that you can’t spec them with the plug-in hybrid powertrain, though, as is so often the case with these compromised enormo-SUVs.

There’s no split tailgate in a Range Rover Sport, but the flat, wide boot opening offers 522 litres as an MHEV five-seater, and expands to 1,686 litres in two-seat truck mode. The rear backrests don’t fold flat, and as per usual for the class, the removable, retractable parcel shelf is hefty and cumbersome.