Seventy miles, says Land Rover. That’s how far the new Range Rover Sport plug-in hybrid should go on electric power alone. But as the battery charge display dropped down to nothing and the engine kicked in only 36 miles after we set off, I wondered if that claim was just a tad optimistic.
In fairness, the battery wasn’t quite fully charged when I departed Daylesford Organic in the heart of the Cotswolds. So let’s call it a neat, round 40 miles. And to be absolutely blunt, I wasn’t exactly driving like I was trying to conserve battery power – in those 36 miles I kept up very happily with the rest of the traffic, squirted the car through winding lanes as quickly as it would go for short periods at a time and executed a genuine uphill overtake, all without so much as troubling the six-cylinder petrol engine.
And it was bitterly cold that day, scarcely above freezing, and we know how EV range suffers in such conditions. So on a warmer day and with a lighter right foot, I can well imagine this car could whisk you from where to are to some place 50 miles away before needing to fire that six-pot into life. I have no idea where the remaining 20 miles might come from.
