Land Rover is reportedly considering a high-performance version of the new Discovery Sport to rival models like the Audi SQ5.
While the Discovery Sport is described by Land Rover director of programs Murray Dietsch as not an “outwardly sporty vehicle,” the official said he’d like to see a more powerful variant.
“We’ll see how it goes with the market,” Dietsch was quoted as saying by Australia’s Car Advice at the Paris Auto Show. The engineer said that a sporty Discovery Sport is entirely hypothetical at the moment, but if it were to be made it would not feature a high-power turbo petrol engine, but rather a diesel similar to the Audi SQ5.
“We’ve got sporty derivatives of other vehicles in Europe that have got higher output engines that are diesel, so it would be horses for courses I think,” Dietsch said. “If you did a 300hp petrol or something like that then there’s probably not going to be a huge amount of call for it in Europe, but if you did a 250hp diesel then there might be,” he added.
Land Rover design director Gerry McGovern said the company was working on flagship variants for every model, similar to Mercedes’ AMG division. The first of these special variants is the Range Rover Sport SVR.
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