They weigh exactly the same, the plug-in hybrid Range Rover and Range Rover Sport. You’d never guess just by looking at them – the Sport is clearly lower and shorter, and you’d assume it would therefore be a bit lighter too. But no. It’s 2735kg whether you choose the full-size version or not.
How can that be? Well, all you really need to make a car longer is some extra tin and a bit more carpet, which doesn’t necessarily add much weight. But to make one wider, you need a whole heap of glass, rubber, plastic, leather and some carpet and tin, and you need it all the way down the length of the entire car. That piles on a whole stack of weight.
And while the Range Rover is taller than the Sport by 50mm and longer by 112mm, it is no wider. Not a single millimetre broader from the tip of the left-hand door mirror to its opposite over on the right. So they weigh exactly the same, which only makes it all the more curious that when I drove them back-to-back earlier this month, I thought the smaller of the two was swept along quite happily on battery power alone, its 141bhp electric motor doing a perfectly adequate job of shifting all that mass along the road. But when I tried the same thing in the Range Rover it felt sluggish, like that same motor (the two P510e PHEVs use identical powertrains) was battling against another couple of hundred kilos of weight. In fact I would have sworn that was the case.
