There are cars that are a rational purchase. Some are bought purely for status. Then there are passion buys – motor cars that make little sense but the want is too strong to ignore. That is the premise of the latest Range Rover Sport SVR, a car built to go off-road and get positively dirty yet, thanks to Jaguar Land Rover’s experts at Special Vehicle Operations, also be impressively fast and offer a luxury gloss.
This 542bhp motor car is the most powerful Land Rover in the marque’s history. Power comes from the supercharged 5.0-liter V8 engine, which SVO have treated to a range of mechanical and dynamic changes to increase horsepower, so the 567bhp is produced at 6000rpm. This 2.3-ton bulk of car can also accelerates to 60mph in as little as 4.3 seconds.
The luxury-performance SUV market is ever-popular and the love for bulky cars that can do everything and more in style does not appear to be diminishing. In terms of looks, the Range Rover Sport SVR isn’t reduced in design – certainly not in the way of Land Rovers of late under the creative guidance of Gerry McGovern whereby all the decoration has been removed for a more Bauhausian approach.
Here the emphasis is quite the opposite – it is all about visualizing the beast that lies beneath through more traditional performance automotive design cues. This includes huge black 22-inch wheels, made to look even more pronounced when teamed with the loud orange metallic body color I have on test. JLR have introduced a body-colored carbonfiber bonnet here which comes as standard and marginally reduces overall weight. For an extra cost, it can be specified as an exposed carbon feature and there is option of ordering similar material paneling around the body, which will no doubt add to the robust, confident look of the SVR.
In fact, nothing about this SVR is modest, right down to the sound. This car has been created to be driven and the soundtrack is essential to adding to the visceral connection between car, driver and audience – other road users. Although, I am not sure if the elderly residents of the quaint English villages I drove through quite appreciated the savage raw growl of the engine.
Sitting high inside the Range Rover Sport SVR, surrounded by lots of soft leather and shinny metal elements, digitally connected to all your worlds, you probably don’t really mind waking up a few sleepy villages. To own one will costs around $120,000, depending on how seduced you become at the hands of the engineering and bespoke design team at Special Vehicle Operations. Yet, the whole point of a car like the SVR is to make it as unique to you as possible. The Range Rover Sport SVR is a car that needs to be driven at the highest of road-legal speeds. It won’t be to everyone’s taste and it may offend a few startled pedestrians but then there will be an audience who will always desire a motor car like this.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nargessbanks/2018/07/31/range-rover-sport-svr/#8c0f2c44c200