Tested: 2023 Range Rover Sport SE P360 Would Rather Chill Than Thrill

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Chipotle—or, as my family calls it, “Taco Bell with some book learnin'”—has an ingenious menu. There’s really only one dish, but the fast-food chain presents the basic ingredients in so many ways that a veneer of individuality disguises the homogeneity. The same can be said of Land Rover’s lineup, which stuffs the same fillings into different wrappers. You want a six-cylinder all-wheel-drive SUV? Have a Range Rover Velar, which looks like a smaller Range Rover Sport, which is a slightly smaller Range Rover, which is like a fancier Discovery, which is a more polished Defender. In this analogy, the Discovery Sport is a lifestyle bowl, and the Evoque is a quesadilla off the kids menu.

The Range Rover Sport is a staple of the company’s SUV menu. The prior generation enjoyed a nine-year run without aging into dowdiness, which is probably why Rover decided, for the 2023 redesign, to keep it looking pretty much the same. The new Sport’s headlights are squintier, but the overall shape is so similar to the previous model that you’d have to park them alongside each other to figure out what changed. The main giveaway is the new power-operated flush door handles, which contribute to the slick looks and slippery 0.29 coefficient of drag.

The Sport is slick to drive too, even in the lightly optioned SE trim. At $90,145 as tested, this is about as inexpensive a Range Rover Sport as you can build. The base SE comes with a 355-hp variant of the electrically supercharged and turbocharged 3.0-liter inline-six that appears in various other tunes and configurations elsewhere in the lineup (there’s a 395-hp flavor and a 434-hp plug-in hybrid). And while the straight-six’s output doesn’t exactly impress when BMW and Jeep are wringing 500-plus horsepower out of the same displacement, the engine is unfailingly buttery and refined. Goose the throttle at low rpm, and the supercharger delivers instantaneous boost, ramping up the torque until the turbocharger blows a gale. You hear a brief high-pitched whine at throttle tip-in, but that’s the only clue to the supercharger’s existence.

The Range Rover Sport doesn’t exactly lollygag when you crack open the throttle, but neither does it hustle the way you might expect based on its rakish looks. The Sport hits 60 mph in 5.7 seconds and covers the quarter-mile in 14.3 seconds at 96 mph. Those numbers are decent enough, but the Sport’s 5-to-60-mph time—7.1 seconds—is a better indicator of how it feels in real-world traffic, which is to say like a 5387-pound vehicle with 355 horse-power. In this case, “Sport” implies a diminutive (see Ford Bronco Sport, Mitsubishi Outlander Sport) rather than a sporting intent. At least the Sport SE delivers decent fuel economy, returning 25 mpg in our 75-mph highway test.

And it is a comfy place to dispatch some miles. Get the eight-speed automatic settled down in a tall gear and the straight-six snoozing at low rpm, and you could be convinced you’re driving an electric vehicle. It’s that smooth and that quiet. In fact, at 70 mph, you’ll hear a mere 66 decibels of interior din, which is verging on luxury-sedan levels of quietude. Some of the credit there goes to the active noise-cancellation system, which uses microphones in each wheel well to sample the sound boiling up from the road and then nullify it, like you’re riding around in a giant pair of noise-canceling headphones.

The standard air springs and adaptive dampers also further the impression of luxurious, untroubled heft, even with the 22-inch clodhoppers fitted to our test car. No matter how shattered the surface, the Range Rover Sport paves the road ahead with lightly toasted marshmallows. Switch to Dynamic mode, and the Pirelli Scorpion Zero All-Season tires can generate 0.81 g of grip on the skidpad, but doing so also introduces head toss and flinty ride motions. As with its powertrain, the Sport SE’s chassis is happiest when you’re not asking much of it. Which, we concede, is how most people use their cars most of the time.

Granted, other trims would push the Sport’s numbers closer to the realm of legit performance SUVs. The Stormer Handling package, unique to the $122,975 First Edition P530, brings active anti-roll bars and rear-wheel steering, and we’re sure that model’s BMW-sourced 523-hp V-8 makes for considerably sprightlier acceleration.

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