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When I become Dictator-for-Life of planet Earth, vehicle names that are “[existing vehicle name] + [extra word]” [in any order or combination] will be outlawed. No “Grand [x]”. Extra words will be trims or maybe packages (Tremor gets a pass, for example) but entirely different vehicles? No.
I’m talking to you, Transit Connect.
I sympathize, David. Vehicle naming is often stupid.
I always thought the Sport was just a trim package thing not a different model. I just have little interest in overpriced, horrifically unreliable POS’s.
“how the ef do they justify that?”
The same way they do Cherokee and Grand Cherokee.
Back in high school days I worked at an auto parts store. A customer came in to buy wiper blades for a “Jeep Cherokee”. I looked it up in the database, sold him the parts indicated, and sent him on his way. Minutes later he came back incensed that they were the wrong size. Reader, they drove (and presumably owned) a Grand Cherokee, and somehow did not recognize that made a difference.
Honestly I get the mixup. All the Range Rover products look the same and other than the biggest vs the smallest I have a hard time telling them apart as well. The fact that I have no interest in them as a product (other than the vintage ones) probably doesn’t help either.
This is what happens when I leave these numbskulls to their own devices for a bit.
Now that you bring it up,where in the holy shitnibbles have you been Adrian? You can come see me after class for your spanking.
I was away seeing friends in Norway for a few days. Then Germany for a week at the Car Design Event (see the Instagram reels), then returned to sickness and life drama. Back soon.
Also only Matron is allowed to administer the spankings around here.
Norway,wohoo! Did you get to experience the extremely pissy weather this autumn? Hope you are ok now anyway and that we get to read something from the design event. Don’t have Instagram,sorry.
Also,fuck the Matron for getting all the fun.
Norway was actually lovely, pretty mild (but still fucking expensive).
I have ideas for writing up the car design event I will pitch.
That is correct, and I wrote about that here.
The 2003-2005 full-size Range Rovers (L322), of course, had the rather underpowered 4.4-liter BMW M62 V8 and were, for all intents and purposes, BMWs with British coachwork. The lore is that the L322 was actually supposed to get the more-advanced electrical architecture from the E65 7 Series and the Rolls-Royce Phantom VII, but when BMW abruptly sold Land Rover to Ford, it refused to give its best tech to a competitor…and so finished development early with a mixture of reskinned E38, E39 and E53 components.
For whatever reason, the 2006 L322 (of which I owned a Supercharged model) got the new-for-2006 Jaguar engines and the new exterior treatment, but retained all of the BMW-era interior, apart from the infotainment and instrument cluster. The interior redesign was not completed until MY2007, and at the same time, they quietly updated the quarter-panel glass to cover the C-pillars, where previously it hadn’t.
On top of that, 2003-2006 models are plagued with what I would consider to be subpar materials longevity. As seen in your picture, that metallic-silver paint scratches off pretty badly, the folding cupholder in the dashboard and especially the one next to the gearshift fail spectacularly, and the BMW modules had several revisions that need to match your car exactly if you replace them. For instance, I had a hard time finding a gear-shift surround (which included the HDC and transfer-case HI/LO switches) to replace my worn one that was the exact right part number.
2007-2009 L322s are the ideal ones to get from a longevity standpoint. The gen. 2 Jaguar 4.2-liter N/A, 4.4-liter N/A, and 4.2-liter S/C engines are practically bulletproof as long as you don’t let them overheat–which doesn’t happen often. The ZF 6-Speed can be problematic because it was designed with “lifetime fluid” and lacked an inspection dipstick, but it is cheap to rebuild and replace (ask me how I know).
As for the L320 Range Rover Sport, it is substantially a “sporty” variant of the L319 LR3/LR4, on a shorter wheelbase. Weirdly, these cars have a unibody/ladder-frame hybrid layout, which is to say that they are stiff enough to be unibodies all on their own, but then have full ladder frames beneath them. (Contrast that to the L322, which was strictly a unibody). Land Rover calls this an Integrated Body Frame. The benefit to the L319 and L320 is that, especially for the 2010-and-up ones that have the problematic gen. 3 Jaguar engines…they can be lifted off of their frames for major engine work.
Allegedly, the L319/L320 platform, called T5 within FoMoCo’s hierarchy, was supposed to underpin the fifth-gen Ford Explorer and the reincarnated Bronco, which would have arrived much sooner.
I personally never cared for the L320 Range Rover Sport’s styling, The slab-sided looks really work for the LR3/LR4, but not so much for the “sporty” Range Rover Sport. But I do currently have LR4 HSE Lux, with the HD package (full-size spare, two-speed transfer case, rear locker).
My experience with a 2006 L322 Supercharged.
My experience with a 2010 L322 Supercharged.
I’ll write up my experience with the 2015 L319 LR4 when we figure out what the fuck is wrong with it, and why it’s triggering a low-fuel-pressure error when the pressures at the rail are, in fact, fine.
I loved your COAL series, good to see you hear as well
I used to work as a technical training instructor for Land Rover at their Irvine, California facility. When I interviewed for the job in 2011, I did not know about the vast differences between the Range Rover and Range Rover Sport. I did get the job and they taught me everything I needed to know about the Land Rover/Range Rover lineup. I’ve forgotten much of that stuff after leaving that gig in 2014…
I remember Clarkson on Top Gear showing the Sport when it came out, and what stuck in my head is they raised the dashboard up inside to give a more sporty driving feel. So seeing the excessively thick black band at the bottom of the windshield is a quick way to tell a Sport at a glance.
Same issue as Bronco Sport and (RIP) Outback Sport. It’s horrible branding.
On Bronco it was particularly bad because they released the Sport to market first, so that ended up with a bunch of people saying “Oh I thought the Bronco was supposed to be cooler” before the regular Bronco hit the streets. I corrected dozens of people about this online for a while. Not smart to release your diet version before the full strength one.
And I’d argue it’s worse, ones a BOF SUV with a solid rear axle meant for serious and hard core offroading with a removable roof. The other is an Escape with a body kit. And people equate them as equals, which Ford probably wants because it sells more of the Sports.
An Escape in a Patagona jacket or Otterbox case is what I’ve heard it referred to as.
Bronco Sport = Escape in Cosplay as a Bronco
Funnily enough, on the Range Rover vs the Range Rover Sport, the Range Rover was fully unibody, while the Range Rover Sport (and related LR3/LR4) was a sort of unibody/BOF hybrid. For all intents and purposes, the Range Rover Sport was compromised from a “sportiness” standpoint because of that. I’m sure the Range Rover Sport and LR3/LR4 got that setup entirely because Ford didn’t want to spend the money developing a fully unibody platform that could get the sort of offroad performance they needed…whereas the contemporary full-size Range Rover had been developed under BMW, at great expense.
I get a kick out of how “Sport” can mean anything from “it’s faster” to “it’s sportier-looking” to “it’s a base trim” to “it’s a completely different and smaller model” to “it has red-orange color accents!” and so on.
It’s so frustrating. A Santa Fe Sport was a two-row while the Santa Fe was the three-row in the late 2010s. Meanwhile in Canada they called those models the Santa Fe and Santa Fe XL respectively. Meanwhile meanwhile, Sport was just a trim for Tucson and Elantra.
I was literally just thinking about that yesterday, stuck behind a Touring something or other, but knowing there was a Sport downmarket, and who knows what the top trim is. Olympic? Sedentary? Sightseeing? It could go any direction, given what “Sport” means.
Or Sport’s side-market cousin, “Limited.”
As Jerry Seinfeld put it, it usually means limited to how many of them they can sell.
At least Jeep was honest and called it *unlimited,* for the Wrangler.
I get a kick of how other Jeep models offer the possibility of getting the “Latitude” trim level with an “Altitude” option package. How the hell is my brain supposed to process the 3D placement of this!?
My series 11a (sort of, it has a perkins diesel engine and most of the back end is from somewhere else) is now badged as a Range Rover Sport for the entirely rationalreason that I thought it was funny ten years ago.
Shit like this is how we get 4-door coupes.
It’s true. But as much as I hate that, I’ve been seeing more and more Buick Envistas and damn they’re growing on me. If they offered a manual, I think I’d be willing to buy one. I know, turn in my autopian passport…
I like how the old XJ had a Sport trim that was so common that once the Grand Cherokee came out people started calling XJ’s Cherokee Sports. So you’d see ads that said Cherokee Sport Limited or Cherokee Sport Freedom Edition… thats too many trims you have to put one back.