New Land Rover Discovery: bold reinvention due for British favourite as JLR House of Brands takes shape
A new Land Rover Discovery is coming and it looks set to take a form unlike anything we’ve seen before from the firm
The new Land Rover Discovery increasingly looks like the missing piece in the jigsaw that is Jaguar Land Rover’s House of Brands masterplan. No need to check under the sofa, though, as it will not be missing for long. Auto Express has had further confirmation that work on the company’s most ‘family focused’ vehicle is well under way.
JLR is going all-in on the House of Brands vision and, in conversation with Auto Express, Range Rover Managing Director, Martin Limpert, set the stall out on how it will all work.
Limpert explained: “We have a clear definition of what the brands stand for. If you take Range Rover, it’s true modern luxury. ‘Elevate leaders’ lives’, is what we say. Defender is about rugged luxury, a real go-anywhere, do-anything car. Jaguar is about exuberance and modernism – ‘copy nothing’. And Discovery has its place in the area of leisure and versatility, where the journey itself is the objective.”
The arrival of the Jaguar Type 01, not to mention the first electric versions of the Range Rover and Range Rover Sport – with the Range Rover GT to follow – has left us with a much clearer picture of how the Jaguar Land Rover portfolio will look in the coming years. If the fog still lingers anywhere, it’s around Discovery.
What will the new Land Rover Discovery be?
Land Rover’s reimagining of the Defender as a vehicle of a more rounded ability set, that’s adept on the road as well as off it, has been a colossal success. But it has also come at the expense of the existing Land Rover Discovery, whose customers have made a beeline for the iconic 4x4 in its new, more versatile form.
First launched way back in 2017, the current fifth-generation Discovery was always the big off-roader that served up family-friendly space and comfort when it wasn’t ploughing through swamps. Now the Defender does this, too, on a more modern platform.
The top brass at JLR are well aware of this and it sounds like they’re cooking up a major transformation for the Discovery brand. The firm’s Vehicle Engineering Director, Matt Becker, explained: “Discovery is getting a lot of attention at the moment. It’s very important as one of the four brands. What we’ll do with it in the future is still TBC, but it will evolve from where it is.
“There are some very interesting concepts I've seen, but we haven’t landed exactly on what it will be in the future yet.”
Tellingly, when asked if JLR would need to carefully position the new Discovery somewhere between the Defender and new Range Rover GT, Becker hinted at a much more radical approach, suggesting engineers could “create something completely different in a white space of its own”.
This seems to sum up the current thinking on Discovery. Major reinvention of the car and brand is needed to carve out a new niche and fully realise the House of Brands vision. “Discovery will be much more in the place of versatility, family and where the journey is,” said Limpert.
“We have a clear proposition that will allow us to talk to different audiences across four brands with individual personalities. The strategic proposition [for Discovery] is versatility, family joy and flexibility, and long-distance journeys for the family.”
As we’ve seen with Jaguar, JLR isn’t afraid of a spot of bold reinvention, and Discovery feels like much less of a risk.
Discovery focused on the family and road travel
Precisely what this outline evolves into will become clear soon enough, but we have potential clues. The electric Range Rover GT that will launch in 2027 takes a much lower and more car-like shape than the tall SUVs we expect from that brand, but it does so while retaining core Range Rover abilities.
“I think when people drive the Range Rover GT, they’ll be quite surprised how good it is off road,” continued Becker. “Can it do everything a Range Rover or Range Rover Sport does? No. But the physics difference means the GT will be able to do different things that those cars can’t.”
A new Land Rover Discovery that takes a more family-focused approach with an emphasis on road-going comfort could be a larger car, perhaps with three rows of seats, that adopts a similar low-riding SUV form to the GT. The return to popularity of the MPV format with an emphasis on spacious, flexible, practical interiors may not have gone unnoticed at JLR.
The Range Rover GT will introduce JLR’s new Electric Modular Architecture (EMA) for ‘medium-sized cars’. But Range Rover’s definition of a ‘medium size car’ may not quite tally with your own. The GT is clearly a sizable hunk of automotive real estate when viewed in the metal, and is expected to be close to the Range Rover Sport’s length of 4,946mm when full specifications are released.
It uses software, electric motors and battery tech shared with the electric Range Rover Sport and the Range Rover – cars that run on the older MLA platform – and similar to that in the Jaguar Type 01. It’s likely, then, that the same electric car technology would find its way into any future electric Discovery.
JLR, however, is very proud of the flexibility in its platforms. This gives it the ability to serve customers across the globe with different powertrains, adapting production to changing market conditions all the while. Hybrid will come to the Range Rover GT in 2028 and we can certainly expect a range of power options in the future Discovery, just as we currently have in the full-size Range Rover.
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