Land Rover Discovery Sport - Live Test Drive.

So welcome everyone to the 2017 Land Rover Test Drives, live here from Eastner at the Land Rover Experience Centre in the United Kingdom. We're here today with Alex Brown, our Land Rover Experience Expert. Alex, welcome. Thank you. Great to have you here. And we're also joined by the 2017 Land Rover Discovery Sport in the beautiful Carpathian Grey. Alex is going to give us a walk around the car before we take on the obstacles that Land Rover Experience Centre here at Eastner has to offer us. So really nice looking car to start with. You've got that aerodynamic silhouette, sculpted surfaces, quite a compact body and the LED lights, both front and rear, so good visibility in all conditions. Really versatile, really nice car. So inside, if I open the door, we can have a look. We've got the Windsor leather in this vehicle, so looking nice and comfy and indeed it is. Electric adjustable seats there as well. We've got not just the second row of seating, but we've got a third row of seating in this vehicle as well. So we've got the versatility of the five plus two arrangements. You can move this middle row around to give yourself plenty of legroom if that's what you need or more legroom in the rear or fold things down to give you more or less boot space again, depending on what you need. Should we jump in and go and test this properly? Indeed. Let's do it. So we've got a nice flight of steps. We've got terrain response mud and rut selected, hill descent control engaged and all I need to do is just ease the car nice and gently up the hill, so a little bit of accelerator just to push us forward. A few lumps and bumps as you can feel, but it is a flight of steps. So terrain response is a fantastic system. Things like throttle response, the way in which the four wheel drive systems are working, hill descent control, traction control, all talked to, all adjusted and balanced to help us get through the terrain. So this mud and ruts program is giving me a really nice control on the throttle to allow me just to ease the car forward and then I can use the hill descent control, take my feet away and just allow the car to come down the hill. Amazing. We've got a 600 millimetre wading depth on Discovery Sport and coincidentally that's just about the depth of the water that we've got through here. Feet away, lower the car into the water and then just a little bit of acceleration, just generating a small bow wave, pushing the car through, keeping it moving nice and steady, helping to move some of that water out of the way. Seeing down the sides there, you can see it's about three quarters of the way out of the wheel. Absolutely perfect for us to drive through there, no problems at all. There we go, out it climbs, easy as that. Excellent towing capacity on this vehicle, two and a half tonnes or 2,500 kilos. So this is quite a nice obstacle. I'm going to lower the car in nice and slowly, just using the foot brake so we get the full effect of it. But it's going to basically take us from being on the level into a side slope, a little bit of an odd sensation. As we come in, front wheel drops into the hole, but of course it means the rear wheel lifts up into the air. So you can feel that slightly odd feeling in the car as it tilts over, rear wheel up on the deck and back down on the ground. About 30 degrees of side slope here, so interesting is probably a good word. Just needs a little bit of acceleration, just get that traction control system working and it balances the power between left and right and up we go. So what we've got is a set of rollers on the left-hand side, so I'm just easing the car up, first wheel coming onto those rollers and the rollers are simply there to allow the wheels to slip. But as you can feel, with just one wheel on the rollers, not really much of a problem, the three remaining wheels of the car are pushing us up the hill. But once we get two wheels on the rollers, so we get a front and a rear, we get a little bit of slip. And as you can feel, initially the car starts to slip, we just need a tiny amount of traction control, a little bit of acceleration and the car simply eases itself forward, no problems, no difficulties at all. Amazing. Down the other side, feet away, let the hill descent control do its job. So quite an interesting climb up here, I'm going to let the ATPC do it. So feet away, let the car climb up the hill and you'll see it's showing us what's going on underneath. So as I steer, you can see the wheels steering on the screen there and indeed the four-wheel drive system, as it's balancing the power between the front and rear, it just eases up the hill. A little bit of wheel spin here, but again, the system realises that that applies a little bit of power and it simply eases the car up the slope, no problems at all. So it's Discovery Sport, it's HSE Luxury, plenty of room for things in the back. So with all the seats folded down, 1,698 litres of boot space and even with the seats folded up, we still get a good amount of room, as I said, even if you've got three people in the back. So let's head out onto the road. So we've put our Terrain Response back to the General Programme, this tunes the car for a nice on-road drive, although it does apply to all surfaces as well. With the nine-speed gearbox, we get a really smooth change of gears, we've always got power, when we need it, we can accelerate and the car really feels nice and composed out on the road. Despite all the off-roading we've done, we can carry on and really enjoy the drive and enjoy these nice country roads. So we've got a whole raft of systems that are there to help us, both in the foreground that we can see and indeed in the background. So things like Lane Keep Assist, which will help us not to drift out of our lane, so if I started to drift over towards the wrong side of the road, it would gently nudge me back towards the correct side. We've got a driver drowsiness monitor, so if I'd been driving late into the night and I was starting to fall asleep, car sensors would help to detect that and it would tell me it's now time to have a rest and take a break. We've also got other features like the Park Assist, with both parallel and perpendicular parking and indeed Park Exit, so when it does park you in a nice tight space, it'll get you out again later. We have Cruise Control and indeed we can have Adaptive Cruise Control on this vehicle. So the great thing about Adaptive Cruise Control is once you've set your speed, the car looks out in front of us and if it sees an object that it needs to adapt to, it will reduce the cruise control speed so that we don't get too close. Just looking ahead of me now in fact reminded me we've got a heads-up display system on the car. Sadly you won't be able to see it, it's only visible from the driver's seat, but in there I've got the current speed and with the traffic sign recognition system on the car, I can not only have the current speed shown to me, but the car will read the road signs so I can see exactly what speed I'm doing and exactly the speed limit of the road, so a really helpful system there. Thanks very much everyone for joining and be sure to tune in next week when we test the all-new Land Rover Discovery. If you enjoyed this episode of the Live Test Drives, you have to do one simple thing to not miss the next. Subscribe to Land Rover's YouTube channel now. Thanks for watching.