Land Rover has enhanced its record-breaking Discovery Sport range with a new special edition.Besides, the sports utility vehicle (SUV) reached its peak in sales, selling 126,078 units in 2017. The new Landmark Edition salutes Discovery Sport’s success as the fastest-selling Land Rover of all time, coinciding with the brand’s year-long 70th anniversary celebrations. The Landmark comes in a unique colour and trim combination, and is available with the Td4 132kW diesel 2.0-litre Ingenium engine.
Global Product Marketing Director, Finbar McFall, said the Discovery Sport is loved by customers because it demonstrates the breadth of Land Rover’s ability, offering unrivalled all-terrain capability with the versatility for up to seven people and a premium interior.McFall said: “We have sold more than 350,000 Discovery Sports globally since its introduction in 2014, with 126,078 models sold in 2017, the best single-model annual sales in Land Rover’s 70-year history.”
The first model to be built on Land Rover’s 70th birthday on April 30 was a Discovery Sport, at Land Rover’s Halewood plant in Merseyside. The vehicle will be used to support a number of projects in 2018, starting with a community resilience project in Scotland which will be announced in this month.
The Discovery Sport Landmark is available in three colours: Narvik Black, Corris Grey and Yulong White, all crowned with a Carpathian Grey contrast roof. It features a sporty and dynamic front bumper, with Graphite Atlas exterior accents and 19 inch Style 521 ‘Mantis’ wheels in Gloss Dark Grey. The interior features Ebony grained leather seats and an Ebony headliner, complemented by dark grey aluminium finishers around the centre stack. The vehicle will be available from September 2018.
Meanwhile, Jaguar Land Rover is developing autonomous cars capable of all-terrain, off-road driving in any weather condition. The world-first ‘CORTEX’ project will take self-driving cars off-road, ensuring they are fully capable in any weather condition: dirt, rain, ice, snow or fog. As part of the project, a ‘5D’ technique combining acoustic, video, radar, light detection and distance sensing (LiDAR) data live in real-time is being engineered. Access to this combined data improves the awareness of the environment the car is in. Machine-learning enables the self-driving car to behave in an increasingly sophisticated way, allowing it to handle any weather condition on any terrain.
Jaguar Land Rover is developing fully- and semi-automated vehicle technologies, offering customers a choice of the level of automation, while maintaining an enjoyable and safe driving experience. This project forms part of the company’s vision to make the self-driving car viable in the widest range of real-life, on- and off-road driving environments and weather.
Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Research Manager, Jaguar Land Rover, Chris Holmes, said: “It’s important that we develop our self-driving vehicles with the same capability and performance customers expect from all Jaguars and Land Rovers.
Self-driving is inevitability for the automotive industry and ensuring that our autonomous offering is the most enjoyable, capable and safe is what drives us to explore the boundaries of innovation. CORTEX gives us the opportunity to work with some fantastic partners whose expertise will help us realise this vision in the near future,” he said.
CORTEX will develop the technology through algorithm development, sensor optimisation and physical testing on off-road tracks in the UK. The University of Birmingham, with its world leading research in radar and sensing for autonomous platforms and Myrtle AI, machine learning experts, join the project. CORTEX was announced as part of Innovate United Kingdom’s third round of Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Funding in March.