Land Rover Discovery Sport R-Dynamic HSE review: a great car you’ll never need

The Land Rover Discovery Sport is definitely the car I’d buy if I needed something I don’t need.

Land Rover Discovery Sport R-Dynamic HSE.

According to every single Google result, the worst road in the world is in Bolivia. I’ve driven it and, I’ll admit, it’s fairly terrible. There’s a constant sense that you’re playing automotive snakes and ladders; that at any moment you’ll land on the wrong square and find yourself in a thousand-foot, land-sky-land-sky-crash-bang-wallop plunge back to where you began.

A road that’s not listed but should be runs along the eastern side of Lake Victoria in Africa. It’s mostly smooth and traffic-free, and you feel encouraged to travel at great speed. But it is peppered with sharp-edged potholes that can burst your tyres. And there is no RAC in Tanzania. Just lions.

The worst road in the world is also not listed. It’s the RN5 in Madagascar and it’s not really a road at all. It was when the French built it, back in the day, but now it looks like a dried-up riverbed. There are boulders the size of space hoppers; there’s mud, too, deep enough to drown in. And the road is so narrow that if you meet a car coming the other way, you are completely screwed.

All of which brings me to the vast array of four-wheel-drive off-roaders that litter the highways and byways of Britain. Yes, they work better than a normal car when it snows – but when it snows here everyone follows the advice to stay at home. The upshot, then, is that no one needs a four-wheel-drive car, partly because conditions here are rarely bad enough to warrant the technology and partly because when they are, we don’t have the skill or balls or tyres to cope.

And so we have the new Land Rover Discovery Sport, which sits in the company’s increasingly complex range as a modern-day equivalent of the old Freelander. And it isn’t new. Not really. When the Discovery Sport was launched several years ago, Land Rover said much better engines would be fitted soon. And that’s all that’s really happened: the new engines have come along to punish impatient people for being early adopters.

For more than a decade I’ve argued that the Volvo XC90 is the only seven-seat school runster worth considering. And I still think it’s a fantastic piece of design. But it has become quite large. That’s where the Discovery Sport comes in. It, too, is available with seven seats, but it’s not really that large at all. They’ve just been really clever with the packaging, redesigning the rear suspension and fitting seat runners so that you really can get five adults and two kids in there.

It’s a nice place to sit as well. This is partly because the engine and gearbox combination do not encourage crazy driving practices, but mostly because this has to be one of the most comfortable cars I have ever driven.

Maybe Audi and BMW can sell you a car of this type with slightly better command and control centres, but they emphatically cannot sell you a car with more off-road gizmos. The tyres will always be the weak link, yet in dry conditions a Disco will get you further into the woods than a Q5 or an X3.

It also has a much weirder rear-view mirror. This is because it’s actually a TV screen taking a feed from a camera mounted on the roof. In the showroom, this is a “sign here” gimmick that will win you over, but on the road it’s strange having the tarmac spooling away from you in the corner of your eye. Better to push a button and use it as a mirror.

I liked the Sport. I liked the way it looked. I liked the extraordinary comfort, and the practicality too. Of course, you don’t need such a thing, and if you ever did, you would be told by the authorities to get under your bed and whimper until the weather improves. But, that being said, this is definitely the car I’d buy if I needed something I don’t need. And I didn’t mind paying through the nose for it.

Land Rover Discovery Sport R-Dynamic HSE

Engine: 2.0-litre turbo-diesel four-cylinder (177kW/500Nm)

Average fuel: 6.6 litres per 100km

Transmission: Nine-speed automatic, all-wheel drive

Price: $82,900

Rating: ★★★