Car review: Range Rover SV Autobiography Dynamic

Don’t let Hammond get his hands on the keys...

‘Only Richard Hammond could crash this thing.’

A few years ago Richard Hammond was asked to drive a car down a runway, and somehow he ended up on his head and then in a coma for a few weeks. And now, having established he can’t drive in a straight line, he has proved he can’t drive round corners either. All he had to do was drive an electric car up a Swiss hill, which he managed, but then somehow, on a left-hand bend after the finish line, he lost control, rolled down a bank and ended up in a hospital. Again.

Seriously, I’m struggling to think of any racetrack in the world that Hammond hasn’t crashed on at some point. At Imola he binned a Noble, at Virginia International Raceway it was a Porsche, at Mugello he bent a Jaguar and at Silverstone, in a 24-hour race, he doomed our efforts in the middle of the night by stuffing a BMW into pretty much everything that was solid. Maybe it’s because he can’t see over the steering wheel. Who knows?

What troubles me most, now that we know he’s OK, is the charred mess he left in Switzerland. It had started that morning as something called the Rimac Concept One. And, frankly, it was amazing. I simply could not believe how fast it was. We are not talking here about a car that’s as fast as a Lamborghini Aventador. It’s much faster than that — faster than anything else I’ve driven, by a huge margin. It has an electric motor at each wheel, which together produce a staggering 895kW. In the time it takes you to work out how fast it accelerates from 0 to 100, it’s doing 200km/h.

I’d never been a fan of electric cars. But that Rimac changed my mind. It was — there’s no other word — brilliant. Hammond loved it. He will probably love it even more now he knows you can roll it down a hill at 190km/h and still get out before it becomes an inferno. And we’ll hear more when he talks about it on The Grand Tour. Unless James May and I have kicked him to death by then.

In the meantime I’ve been having a bit of a leaning-back-in-the-chair, pen-sucking muse about what will power our cars in a few years’ time.

As you may recall, the world’s environmentalists declared several years ago that petrol engines were extremely bad for the planet and we should all buy diesels instead. They said we could not argue with cold, hard facts. In the UK, the rules were changed to make buying diesel cars cheaper and millions of people took advantage — only to be told this year that the cold, hard facts may not have been entirely accurate and that petrol is a much cleaner fuel after all. So now people with diesels are being told they must in future pay a fortune to refuel them, park them or drive them into central London. Which means they are all trying to sell. And what they’re getting is 10¢. If you’re in that boat, I’d send a bill for the losses to Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. Maybe it’d make them think twice next time they have some cold, hard facts they’d like to share.

Even the European model feels like the British Museum inside.

I run a diesel. It’s an old Range Rover. The first of the TDV8s. And it works well. After I’ve filled the tank, the trip computer tells me I have a range of 800km before I need to fill up again. Which is good if you like shooting. You can get to Yorkshire and back without having to face the ridicule of walking into Leicester Forest East services in a pair of tweed shorts. All sensible Range Rover owners have diesels.

Nevertheless, I spent last week tootling about in a petrol-powered Range Rover SV Autobiography. There’s nothing I can say about this car that hasn’t been said a million times already. It’s in a class of its own. And it’s ludicrously fast. It’s like being in the British Museum while falling down a cliff, and yet, incredibly, you still have control over where you’re going. Only Richard Hammond could crash this thing.

The problem was that after 240km the petrol gauge was into the red zone. It’s not the money: if you can afford a car like this, the cost of refuelling isn’t important. No, it’s the fact that, unless you are very good at fuel-light bingo, you can’t get from London to Leeds on one tank.

So what’s to be done? Well, there’s now a hybrid Range Rover, but that’s part electrical and part diesel, so it doesn’t really get round the anti-diesel nonsense. The only solution is pure electrical power. It’d work, too. Near-silent cruising when you’re on the road and immense torque when you aren’t.

I’d like to suggest Land Rover consult the boffins at Rimac about the technology. But I fear that, thanks to Hammond, they’re going to be a bit busy for the next few weeks building a replacement car.

Range Rover SV Autobiography Dynamic
Engine: 5.0-litre V8 petrol, supercharged (405kW/680Nm) | Transmission: Eight-speed automatic, all-wheel drive | Average fuel: 12.8 litres per 100km | Price: From $316,000 | Score: 3 out of 5