For long years Range Rover was my favourite SUV. Timeless design, exquisite interior quality and off roading ability were the details which kept it top of my favourite list. However, one and half year ago I had chance to drive Range Rover Vogue TDV8 model and every good feeling of mine were collapsed. I was expecting a much better vehicle than this.
When I started driving it; steering wheel was not communicative and it was hard to feel the road, breaks were senseless pedal was not that effective, engine had a huge turbo lag as big as a black hole in space, traction control was letting too much wheel spin on corners in normal road condition and stability programme was struggling to control back of the car, V8 diesel was very heavy and car tend to dive from noise and a little bit heavy breaking exaggerate the situation more.
In a half an hour drive, my dreams were lost. And I started to think why this happened? May be I should compare with another SUV and think twice. I drove Mercedes ML 320 CDi and I drove in the same as I drove the Range Rover and surprisingly Mercedes did not behave like Range Rover. Ok, it was V6 diesel I should have driven V8 diesel but the rest was much better than Range Rover.
I shared my reviews about Range Rover with a Land Rover engineer and he did not reject any of those and told me to drive the new one. Unfortunately I did not have any chance to drive a Range Rover, especially in Turkey if you don't have that amount of money, you should be lucky to drive one! However, I read something on Land Rover website;
"The new 2010 Range Rover is now equipped with a new braking system, comprehensively updated to provide enhanced stopping power and improved driver feel."So, it is obvious that even the Land Rover understood that breaks were not that good! And they introduced "Enhanced Understeer Control and Electronic Traction Control". I guess, 2010 Range Rover is a far better car than the previous one. I will share my comments when I drove it ;)
Pictures are from;
Landrover
