Land Rover Discovery Sport

With the launch of the Evoque, Range Rover and Range Rover Sports, Land Rover has sufficiently bolstered its range of high-profit 'luxury' family of vehicles. Now, the Discovery Sport has been unveiled as the first of its renewed 'leisure' models.

As these pictures show, the boundaries between the luxury and leisure ranges lie pretty close together, with the new Sport drawing heavily on the Evoque's design themes: a few degrees of approach angle are traded for rounder, far-less utilitarian bumpers; the character lines are more deeply cut into the bodysides and rise more steeply, and the C- and D-pillars are much faster than the outgoing Freelander/LR2's.

The panoramic roof also abandons the old car's horizontal lines, with a roofline that now slopes gently towards the rear. That said, the longer rear overhang does regain some utility in the form of a pair of occasional third-row seats that fold into the floor.

The new car's rear is more crossover than SUV, with a much cleaner, more integrated bumper, while the old model's simple, vertically stacked tail-lamps are swapped for fussier horizontal lamps that help emphasize the car's extra 64mm of width.

And just in case you missed the fact that the car is now a Discovery, the capitalized text positively shouts it from the tailgate, although whether that should be preceded by Range Rover, rather than Land Rover is a moot point.

It's inside that the Discovery Sport diverges from the Range Rovers. Although the vertical center stack theme is present, the buttons and knobs are extremely simple to the point of looking quite basic, and while the car is the first to feature JLR's new eight-inch touchscreen, the gauge pack's small TFT screen sits between a pair of resolutely analog dials.

We'll see the Discovery Sport at the Paris Motor Show next month, while the car will go on sale next January. It remains to be seen if the original Evoque's customers make the switch to the newer Discovery Sport, adding extra polish to the Land Rover brand and further blurring the boundaries between luxury and leisure models.

Full Land Rover Discovery Sport gallery >

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