Range Rover Autobiography review: it’s Jeremy Clarkson on wheels

Like to look down on others? The gargantuan, $300k Range Rover Autobiography might be the car for you.

A lot of car: the Range Rover Autobiography LWB P530

I really must apologise, for I fear I may have given you all the wrong impression, repeatedly. You might think that I would like to own a Ferrari, a Lamborghini or some other similarly savage supercar, but the fact is I simply couldn’t, in the same way that I couldn’t wear a leopard-print unitard made from actual leopards.

It’s not just the money (although if I had a few million spare I might be tempted), it’s more the fact that a shiny, shouty supercar just wouldn’t suit me. In short, I would just feel like a colossal, detestable wanker if I bought one (almost inexplicably, I could, however, just manage to live with myself in a Porsche 911, obviously a second-hand one). This hard and horrid fact struck me recently when my mellowing old mentor felt brave enough to admit to me that he’d always harboured a secret desire to own a Range Rover, and yet he knew that he could not because, as we both agreed, it would suit his personal brand the way that buying a private jet would sit with Greta Thunberg. My old boss is of the landed gentry, without the gentry part – a grass-chewing, tool-wielding fellow who lives outside Canberra because he finds it too busy (he also insists on calling it a “city”, which bemuses me no end).

Inside the cabin

The Range Rover impresses him as a piece of engineering and he would love to use it to bash over boulders, pull stuck cows out of muddy paddocks and ferry farting dogs, but if he went into “town” people would point at him and laugh. He might as well start wearing a crown. I must admit I am also blown away by what every new Range Rover achieves, from an engineering perspective, and the latest one even manages to look good, which isn’t easy when you’re putting something the size of a barn, or an aircraft hangar, on wheels. This one does away with conventional brake and parking lights, replacing them with a strip of digital goodness that is otherwise blacked out to provide a character line for its enormous behind.

It also hides its tow ball (you can press a button to pop it out when you need it), because, let’s face it, they’re about as pretty as a metallic penis. The Range Rover I drove was the long-wheelbase version, which meant that the rear doors were so large that Rose could have saved Jack and possibly the entire orchestra at the end of Titanic on just one.

Exterior detailing

My children were sitting a few metres behind my driver’s seat, but I think I heard them cooing appreciatively over their level of comfort, just before I fired up the car’s incredible 34-speaker Meridian stereo system. My mother, meanwhile, begged me to let her sleep in the passenger seat for the week, so enamoured was she of its highly targetable massage functions.

Personally, I was most taken with the screen that can show you the quality of the air around you, and then make you feel smug by demonstrating how much better it is inside the car, thanks to its filtration system. You can even be forewarned about the quality of the air at your destination (including whether you’ll need to wear a mask when you get there), but unfortunately I couldn’t program the satnav to take me to Beijing.

Driving the Range Rover is also impressive because it gives you a sense of looking down on the proletariat, a feeling of wafting over the imperfections of the outside world, which is fortunately silenced by your double-glazed windows, and all those speakers.

Indeed, it handles, corners and generally behaves far better than anything this large should be able to; there’s even a button shaped like the Stig’s head that turns it into a snarling performance SUV, taking advantage of its 4.4-litre turbocharged V8’s 390kW and 750Nm to throw its 2.72-tonne mass from zero to 100km/h in just 4.8 seconds. If that sounds implausible, trust me, it feels even more so. Indeed, applying maximum acceleration is the only thing that makes this impeccably polite Range Rover misbehave, as its nose rears into the air as if it were a startled elephant.

The pedestrian’s view is something like this

From past experience, I also know that the Range Rover is capable of the kind of off-road shenanigans that makes men of a certain rugged outdoorsy-ness dribble on themselves in admiration. It is, in short, or rather in very long, a lot of car, but it would want to be for $304,700.

Personally, I could never own one, not just because the top-spec version I had is called the Autobiography, which has to be the most onanistic name for a car ever, and not because the rear tailgate is designed to watch polo from. A Range Rover is just not me, as much as I admire and enjoy it. So who would it suit? Well, another former employer of mine, a hugely rich man possessed of no self-doubt whatsoever and very much of the gentry, with an accent and a collection of Wellington boots to match. Yes, the Ranger Rover truly is Jeremy Clarkson on wheels.

RANGE ROVER AUTOBIOGRAPHY LWB P530

ENGINE: 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8 petrol (390kW/750Nm). Average fuel 11.8 litres per 100km TRANSMISSION: Eight-speed automatic, all-wheel drive

PRICE: $304,700

STARS: 4.5 out of 5