Range Rover Sport P510e review

When the engine does kick in, you feel the car surge forward heartily and hear a clearly synthesised, but nonetheless quite appealing six-cylinder warble roll around the cabin. This isn’t the sharpest, most responsive hybrid powertrain out there and gearshifts can be lethargic even in manual mode, but otherwise it’s really rather impressive.

PHEVs make a tremendous amount of sense for company car drivers who can slash their tax bills. They also work well for private buyers who can charge on a cheap tariff at home overnight or at work during the day, and thereby complete every local journey without burning a single hydrocarbon. But if you can’t plug in overnight or at the office, a PHEV simply isn’t the right option for you – once the battery is depleted, you’ll be lugging hundreds of kilograms of dead weight around with you and, economically speaking, you’ll probably be better off refilling the petrol tank than fast charging the battery. Try a diesel instead – or the V8…

Is there another reason to steer clear of the PHEV? Because at more than 400kg heavier than some other models in the Range Rover Sport line up, and 200kg more than the V8, the hybrid could be at a disadvantage in all sorts of important ways. Actually, it’s inevitable that it is. Even so it rides beautifully, steers with remarkable precision, feels two-thirds its size and weight at very low speeds thanks to a rear-wheel steering system that pivots the car sharply around tight bends, and when you fling it along a winding road it manages not to fall to pieces.

I’ve written in the past that I’m not at all interested in very tall, exceptionally heavy SUVs that try so hard to be sports cars – because they simply never will be. This Range Rover Sport strikes the right balance between everyday comfort and a degree of athleticism that means you can hurry it along a Cotswold back road and not scare yourself witless. There’s barely any body roll in corners and very good control of all that weight as the road leaps up and down, all of which builds your confidence in the car.

In fact, it’s such a notable step on from the previous Range Rover Sport in both agility and comfort that you really have to admire the work Land Rover’s engineers have done here. The body structure is far stiffer – I always thought that a major flaw of the previous model – and in terms of refinement and noise suppression, it belongs to a different league to the last one.

Inside you find an ultra-modern dashboard layout, high-grade materials and solid build quality, an intuitive touchscreen system, luxurious Bridge of Weir leather and exceptionally comfortable seats. In normal driving, though, on A-roads that flow gently across the landscape, I found the steering a little too heavy. I get that this is the ‘sport’ model and some extra heft in the steering reflects that, but I want to guide a car like this along roads like that with a thumb and two fingers, both elbows keeping the armrests gainfully employed. The resistance in the steering made that unnecessarily difficult.

So is the PHEV the one to have? For company car drivers it’s a no brainer, but you’d have to feel very strongly about the benefits of driving locally or through towns on electricity alone to choose either plug-in model over a cheaper purely petrol or diesel variant. The P400 petrol, for instance, has a 395bhp six-cylinder engine, it’ll reach 62mph in 5.7 seconds (only 0.3sec behind the P510e) and is lighter by 425kg. You’ll also pay from £87,395 for one of those, whereas the top-spec plug-in model tested here starts at £108,600. (Specified like-for-like in plush Autobiography trim, that price difference is cut in half.)

The PHEV powertrain works very well indeed and for certain buyers, it’ll be the most appealing model by a mile. The rest of us, however, should save a stack of money and a whole pile of weight and choose a non-hybrid version instead. But given how vastly improved is this Sport over the last, should you overlook the full-size Range Rover altogether? I’ll let you know next week.