By Nauman Farooq
Over the last decade, whenever anyone would ask me as to what is my absolute favourite SUV? I would without hesitation say the big Range Rover Supercharged.
No other SUV felt as good as the Range Rover Supercharged, nothing looked better, and nothing came even close to matching its interior.
In short, it has been the ultimate truck, perhaps even the ultimate luxury vehicle. However, it has had a rather bad reputation for reliability!
When Land Rover started work on the new generation model of the Range Rover (which made its debut in 2013), the first thing they say they tackled was to make this new vehicle much more reliable than the old one. My recent experience taught me, they didn’t do their homework correctly!
I lived with this new, 2018 Range Rover Supercharged LWB (Long Wheel Base) Autobiography for a week, a week that saw me put roughly 1000-km on it, and things didn’t go as planned!
During my time, just about anything and everything in this vehicle had an issue. The main problem it faced was with recognizing that the key is inside the vehicle! Even when I held the key exactly where its signal would be best, it still would think the key is not in the vehicle, and hence it wouldn’t start – very annoying! When it would start, often times the two LCD screens that make up for the central dashboard, would go on a vacation, and when they did work, many of the features you’d ask from the touch-screen layout would not work – the massaging seats feature in particular. These kind of issues on any new car are irritating, but downright unacceptable on a SUV costing over $160,000. Perhaps it just The more common issue most people have with the Range Rover, especially ones equipped with the boosted motor, has to do with its fuel-economy – but given its massive 5.0-liter, supercharged, V8 motor (which produces 518-hp and 461-lb/ft of torque), and its weight (2,451 kg curb weight), that should be expected. I averaged 14.6-liters/100km, which is quite incredible for a vehicle like this – and some of that credit goes to its eight-speed automatic transmission, which lets you just hum along with as little revs as possible. However, it will only drink premium fuel, but if you can afford to buy this vehicle, you can afford the fuel, too!
It’ll drink far more, if you put your foot down – zero to 100 km/h takes just 5.4 seconds, and its top speed is electronically limited to 209 km/h; that’s fast!
However, I found that throttle response has far too much lag at most times, even when you have the vehicle in its ‘Dynamic’ setting. As you’d imagine, this Range Rover has many settings available for when you need to tackle rough terrain – you can even raise and lower the vehicle for your convenience. I bet it would do rather well off tarmac, but who in their right mind would take a vehicle like this on anything but a paved road?
It might have off-road capability, but it is primarily a luxury vehicle, and it sure has the space (especially in this LWB model) and features to please its clients – provided all those features work! In the back, it had a power operated armrest that would divide the rear seats – it went down, but then refused to go back up! The number of issues I had with this vehicle, were seriously annoying!
Those issues even masked over its good qualities, such as a comfortable and quiet ride, and its superstar looks! The 2018 Range Rover Supercharged LWB pricing starts from $124,500 – my tester was worth about $163,000.
Given the number of issues it had -and the ones I’ve had with the big Range Rover in previous years, too- it is not a vehicle that I can recommend to anyone. Land Rover really needs to address reliability issues with their vehicles, especially the flagship model – because, if that is sorted, this would be a wonderful vehicle to own!
