Few things excite the human imagination more than a pleasant incongruity – like a talking dog, for example, or a North Korean leader who wants world peace. Then there's the Range Rover SVR, a luxury SUV that weighs more than two and a half tons, but can accelerate to 100 kilometres an hour in just over four seconds.
If you've spent any time pondering automotive performance statistics, you will realize that this is not normal. If the SVR were a human being, it would be one of those freakish NFL running backs who can bench press 500 pounds, but also dunk a basketball and run 100 metres in 10.5 seconds. Larry Csonka maybe? Powerful, but too slow. No, the SVR would be Marshawn Lynch, the former Seattle Seahawk player known as Beast Mode due to his otherworldly combination of American Pharaoh-like speed and high-torque, Clydesdale-style power. Yes, that's the SVR: Beast Mode, but with a $500 haircut and a Brioni suit.
The luxury SUV market is ultra competitive. Well-heeled drivers can pick from a list of gilded beasts by Porsche, Mercedes, BMW, Jaguar, Bentley and… well, it goes on. But Range Rover has carved out its own niche, largely due to pedigree: The brand is the longstanding ride of choice for English nobles (including the Queen) and that means a lot to arrivistes looking to burnish a less-than-historic family name (I'm looking at you, Kim Kardashian.)
Range Rovers are interesting vehicles. Unlike most SUVs, they're actually capable of going off-road thanks to their long-travel suspension and low-range transfer cases. But few owners avail themselves of these capabilities – most Range Rovers are condemned to the smooth pavements of the luxury retail circuit.
My test SVR was the kind of vehicle that attracts buyers like Victoria Beckham and Paris Hilton. It was beautifully appointed, with a carbon-fibre engine cover (a $2,000 option), a Meridian Signature 3D Audio System ($4,550 extra) and paint that was both beautiful to look at and exquisitely named: Estoril Blue Metallic (an $1,800 upcharge.)
No matter how many times I drove it, I never stopped marvelling that such a heavy vehicle could be so fast and agile. But of course there's a price to pay. And the $150,000-plus cheque you'll be writing to the dealer for the purchase, options and taxes is just the start. All that fury and mass have to be dealt with somehow – so yes, the SVR is going to run through brake pads and suspension bushings the way an NFL linebacker goes through knee meniscus. And you'll need a few stiff drinks before you contemplate the SVR's predicted depreciation.
But cruising southern Ontario's Highway 400 on a sunlit day, it's easy to forget all that. The SVR is a beautiful place to be. The seats are perfect, the eight-speed transmission clicks through the gears with the precision of a well-oiled Rolex, and the exhaust system is tuned to the sonic perfection you would expect from a symphony instrument. The 550-horsepower, supercharged engine provides endless thrust, and you ride in bullet-train luxury. All is calm, and the SVR's systems attend to you like a phalanx of robot butlers – the radar cruise control scopes the traffic ahead, the blind-spot warning system alerts you to vehicles sneaking up alongside, and the temperature is perfectly controlled.
Machines like the SVR have helped shatter the rigid stereotypes and ironclad categorizations that once ruled the automotive universe. When I was a boy, luxury cars were, by definition, Brobdingnagian barges that cocooned their riders in a Featherbed womb of comfort. The price was performance – old-school Cadillacs offered all the steering precision and cornering power of a Carnival cruise liner. On the other end of the scale were sports cars like the Shelby Cobra and the Lotus 7, small, unyielding machines that stripped away unnecessary creature comforts (like heating systems, roofs and seat padding) in the name of mind-blowing performance. The choice was yours: You could swan around in a Cadillac, fat and happy, or suffer in an open-topped Triumph, nailed to the cross of automotive performance. Your vehicle selection defined you. Would you go soft, and allow yourself to be seduced by sybaritic comfort and a gliding ride? Or would you remain true to the sports car religion, with its granitic seats and scourging windblast?
Never mind all that. Now we have machines like the SVR. The SVR accelerates harder than the legendary Shelby 427 Cobra ever did, but it's a different brand of speed entirely. Gone is the Cobra's rude blast and sitting-on-the-edge-of-the-wing thrill, replaced by an experience of imperturbable calm and white-glove civility. But you still hit 100 km/h in just over four seconds. It's like sitting in a private club that has been launched down the road by a Saturn V rocket booster stage.
Range Rovers are part of a kinked family tree, the direct descendant of the original Land Rover, a slab-sided, utilitarian machine that came to market in 1948 (imagine an aluminum-bodied, English-built Jeep). In the late 1960s, Rover began tinkering with an upscale version of its traditional vehicle, hoping that the country-estate crowd would go for it. Rebranded as a Range Rover, the new vehicle came to market in 1970.
The first Range Rovers hewed to a functional aesthetic, with plastic interiors that could be hosed down like a horse stall. And now, 46 years later, we have the SVR, a machine that has gone around the fabled Nürburgring race track in just over eight minutes. It shouldn't be possible, but the stopwatch hath spoken. As incongruities go, it's not quite a talking dog. But close enough.
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