2015 RANGE ROVER SPORT SUPERCHARGED REVIEW

Range Rover's voracious Supercharged Sport is like a towering, 7-seat supercar

The supercharged Range Rover Sport is one of the top dogs in the fight for sport SUV superiority, with stunning sports-car handling and staggering off-road capabilities

“Well, now we’re in trouble,” I thought as the Range Rover Sport slid backwards down a sand dune, inconveniently littered with pine trees. It looked like the kind folks at Land Rover had made a terrible mistake sending me out to the dunes of Sand Lake, Oregon

Even their thoughtful inclusion of a hardened, off-road driving instructor was not enough to get us out of the predicament — this expert’s best efforts to un-beach the car from where I had gotten it stuck were of no avail. We stepped out of the vehicle to find the Sport buried to its skid plates in sand, perilously close to sliding its flawless paint into a tree. I thought that I had finally found something this heretofore impeccable vehicle couldn’t do

I won’t leave you in suspense: We didn’t die of starvation in the sand, and we weren’t eaten by marauding ATV riders (in fact some stopped to help). That is because, despite the grim situation, I was very wrong about the Range Rover Sport — it can do anything

Does it all

It took some digging and airing down of the conspicuously out of place street performance tires, but in a surprisingly short amount of time, the Sport and its insane 510-horsepower powerplant were soon howling up the 30-degree slope with a vengeance. This experience was simply a repeat of my entire week with the Range Rover Sport: Every time I thought I had finally showed it up, it struck back

On the sand, that meant I found myself doing massive powerslides in a $90,000 luxury SUV that most customers will use to get from the local Whole Foods to soccer practice. The sensation of looking back and seeing a massive, 50-foot long rooster tail of sand — and an army of stunned onlookers — was enough to leave me giddy. And that was before I even mention the noise

The 5.0-liter supercharged V8 lurking beneath the Range Rover’s hood howls like a T.rex on meth. Slapping down the throttle out on the sand creates a choking torrent of noise so loud that the world seems to be coming to an end

It isn’t all powerslides and high-speed shenanigans, either. Despite the eventual mess I would get the car in, the Sport has the ability to master just about any terrain. The driver interacts with the off-roading tech through the Terrain Response system, a knob that rises out of the center console. This can be set to specific types of terrain such as mud, snow, or sand, each depicted with its own inscrutable pictogram. The lazy and incompetent (such as yours truly) can always leave the system in auto, allowing the onboard systems to dictate settings for the diff, traction control, and suspension

The result of this system is that there are very few circumstances in which the Range Rover Sport can’t move its wheels. The limiting factors are tires and skill. My press demonstrator was fitted with Continentals that were excellent for the on-road performance, but struggled in sand. I found this out when I ground to a halt and then began back sliding on a steep dune. I got the Rover Sport stopped and switched places with the Land Rover instructor, only to find that we couldn’t move forward — and backwards was going to be dicey. In the end, we found ourselves buried to the axles in sand, with the tail end of the rig perilously close to a drop off and a very hard looking tree

I was convinced we were in for it then, and in most vehicles we would have been. But in fact, once we dug away some sand with the help of a few friendly ATV riders and aired the tires down to the point they were resting on their sidewalls, the mighty Range Rover roared away up the slope

This was an impressive feat, but where the mighty Sport truly surprises is on the road