Land Rover Range Rover Sport 2008 Review

What I need is a time machine like Doctor Who's TARDIS, to cut travel times down to nothing.

But while the TARDIS car doesn't exist, Land Rover does have the next best thing, which is a Range Rover Sport. This is a car “conceived”, to use marketing-speak, as a sports tourer. In other words, it is meant to achieve the diametrically opposed goals of being a sports car and a 4WD. In lieu of a TARDIS, that'll do.

This has been tried many times before but, where others pretend, the Sport starts to succeed.

This is because the car can be tailored to the terrain; the air suspension means it can sit low on the road to minimise body roll, yet raise ride height when off-road. It can change throttle response and gearshift points with terrain response.

Around town the Sport is an auto diesel, so you don't get an instantaneous response, but it's nimble enough. The 11.6m turning circle is good, and if you drop the air suspension it's less than 1800mm tall, so car parks are no problem, especially with the great all-round visibility.

Friends who own sports cars made rude remarks when they discovered the RRS weighs 2400kg, offers 140kw, is diesel and regally achieves a 0-100 time of 12.7 seconds.

All-out acceleration does not leave the driver a gibbering mess, innards pulped by g-forces as

the car hurtles towards the horizon. The tyres begin to squeal at cornering speeds that a sports car would consider a warm-up.

In short, on a racetrack the Sport would be left floundering well behind any ordinary sedan.

But the Sport is not about track days. It is about real-world speed, when you need to be somewhere else, rather quickly.

And when I am in that sort of situation, my preferred teleportation device would be a Sport or other quick 4WD, not some snarling sports mobile. For two extremely good reasons.

First, not all roads are smooth, especially the ones I find myself on. For example, on the way home some maintenance workers have cut the bitumen to install a pipe, leaving a temporary gravel patch. In the Sport, I didn't even slow down and barely felt the bump.

A sports car driver would have left a trail of plastic body parts all the way to the chiropractor. Rough roads? Again, the Sport simply wafts over seriously damaged roads, which would see road cars gingerly crawling in second. If we remain in the real world, at real speed limits, let's also assume you are going to drive quickly, but safely.

As you arrive at a hairpin, standing on the excellent brakes, you glance sideways, and see that the apex and exit is indeed clear. Then you can attack the corner, secure in the knowledge that the suspension, tyres and all-wheel-drive will help deal with any mid-corner irregularities.

In, say, the Lotus Elise, you glance sideways and get an excellent view of the tops of grass blades, with the local insects peering down at you.

Whatever dangers the corner may hold will not be apparent until you're almost through it. Then you also quickly discover the road is not quite as smooth as it seemed from within the Sport, and that does nothing for confidence.

And what if you're in a hurry and your back country short cut suddenly turns to dirt? In a Sport, you'd laugh. In a highly strung sporty car you'd cry. I've been with friends in this situation; we were overtaken by a farmer in a ute full of hay.

Hence my contention that a quick 4WD is often quicker, real world, than a quick sports car.

I might add that the Sport can be loaded with all my digital SLR kit and much more, whereas the Elise is chockers with a small digital camera.

But enough about on road. By definition, every all-rounder is competent at lots of things. But they also tend to have a speciality, and for the RRS it's low-range work.

There are other 4WDs that can match or exceed it for at-speed dynamics. But the only ones that can keep up with it in the rough would be blown away like confetti on the smooth stuff.

For an indie suspension car, the Sport has long wheel travel with cross-linked height-adjustable air suspension. Translation; clearance is not a problem. It's manoeuvrable.

Ample torque and, thanks to the tailored throttle response, you can request another quarter-Nm and it is delivered instantly, thank you, sir. Good traction control. The car just works off-road, and I now believe the Land Rover exec who told me it was better than the Defender.

My litmus test is simple: with all-terrain tyres, would I hesitate to point the car's nose down any 4WD track in the wet? Not in the Sport.

If the RRS is to be your personal transport, you'll be spending a lot of time at the wheel, and that's no bad place to be. But there are niggles.

First, no external input into the CD player — but it is MP3 compatible. The dials are clear, but the rest of the dash is looking less than modern, and no sat-nav. You can't secure it on a hill as the park brake only locks the rear wheels. The auto can be slow to shift, so use the manual override. Another 100kW wouldn't go amiss, or more boot space.

But all of this is like wandering into the Garden of Eden and noticing that the grass hasn't been cut in the past week. It's forgivable, in the big scheme of things, because the Sport has that most desirable of features: desirability.