Range Rover Sport D350 Autobiography - long-term review

Road tester-y car types – the sort who need their daily dose of oversteer and love clarifying the difference between primary and second ride – will tell you they’ll know if a car is fundamentally ‘right’ within 50 metres of driving it. To an extent they’re correct, yet these days there’s much more to a car than how your butt and brain feel as it goes down your favourite road. To the extent that despite six months with the Range Rover Sport, with every passing mile I seem to get further from a verdict. It’s because the Sport is a “but…” car. For everything good, there’s something bad.

Take the design. It’s clean, it’s uncluttered, and when painted in Firenze Red and matched with thuggish 23in wheels, it looks great.

But… the black plastic used for the silly side vents and pretend bonnet louvres feels cheap and tacky; the aura of the pop-out door pulls is undone every time you approach the driver’s side and glimpse the emergency keyhole and plastic blanking plate behind the handle; and the more you look at the RR Sport, the more you realise the front wheels don’t quite fill the arches. It’s been neutered, to save the widest front track for the SV range-topper.

Switch to the inside, and in this Sport, there were lashings of white leather – and white it did remain, despite the unrelenting efforts of the countryside and two children. Together with the big spar of matching material across the dash, the Range Sport still resembled an impractically trimmed concept car until the day it left us. I drove another Sport more recently, with black leather throughout, and without ‘our’ car’s £1,460 forged carbon door trims, and it just didn’t have the same wow factor.

But… yet more black plastic is at fault in here. Land Rover loves a bit of ‘reductive design’ but it doesn’t work when all you’re left with is acres of piano black trim. It shows dust, gets smeary with fingerprints, and in no way appears any different from similar materials in a supermini. The textured door fabrics and exotic-looking metal trim shows Land Rover can do better – and should when there’s a six-figure entry fee to this Autobiography spec.

Flipping it the other way, this Range Sport had a love-hate relationship with Android Auto, and Land Rover’s sat-nav graphics already feel archaic, but… when the car and the phone were friends, the central infotainment screen neatly mirrored Spotify, and the Google Maps was integrated easily between the digital dials. Better yet, this is the first touchscreen where I didn’t want for physical buttons. No, really. There are enough digital shortcuts on either side of the screen, and some double as sliders, so you just drag the temperature display or volume control higher or lower for hotter/colder and louder/quieter respectively.

But… for every bit of reductive design inside and out, under the skin the engineers haven’t been on the same ‘Spark Joy’ journey. Case in point is our car’s official weight, a portly 2,360kg, to which extras like bigger 23in wheels, a full-size spare, an electric tow bar and a powered tailgate helped nudge it to over 2.6 tonnes, according to the scales we put it on. Which means Rowan’s recently departed Porsche Cayenne rode better, rolled less, and generally embarrassed the Sport in the handling department by a considerable margin.

But… while the Cayenne felt special to drive if you were in road tester mode, it didn’t feel special the rest of the time. The Range Sport, by contrast, was still somehow regal on the most banal of trips, be it a short school run or a 600-mile motorway schlep.

This is where the Range Sport wins, and loses. A Proper Range Rover nails its fitness-for-purpose mandate perfectly, never trying to be anything more than a big luxurious beast, but the Sport is fundamentally the same car beneath, but wants – yet fails – to be sporty. Whether you’re hoping for a Range Rover, or a sporty SUV, will determine whether you’ll love it, or whether you’ll be disappointed. Either way, I’d just prefer it with less black plastic.