2016 Land Rover Discovery Sport HSE Lux - Four Seasons Introduction
Miles to Date: 1,200
Out at our California office, the Four Seasons fleet was starting to look a little, well, impractical. See, living in the land of constant sunshine means that it's the ideal place to begin life with some of our sportier Four Seasons vehicles. The 2016 Mazda MX-5 Miata Club showed up about the same time as our 2016 Alfa Romeo 4C Spider, a replacement for our recently departed 4C Coupe . Sure, our existing Four Seasons GTI could be considered practical, especially as ours is the four-door variant. But we needed another vehicle capable of hauling more than two people and a couple overnight bags. And gee, something a little more rough and ready than our sporting trio couldn't hurt. But what will fill this void?
It didn't take much deliberating before asking the nice folks at Land Rover to hand us the keys to a 2016 Land Rover Discovery Sport for a year. Sure, there are larger, more off-road ready and more prestige-y Land Rover models, but the entry-level Disco Sport hits a sweet spot in the market. It's a relatively affordable option to the brand's more prestigious offerings, and it's also just an appropriate size for tearing around Southern California's congested highways and twisty backroads. Staffers who'd driven one also agreed that the little LR allows for healthy doses of both fun and practicality in the process.
And so it was that one sun-soaked day, a 2016 Land Rover Discovery Sport HSE Lux arrived in our garage. Land Rover buffs will know this is the top-spec trim level, meaning our Corris Grey Disco has plenty of standard equipment along with a few optional extras. The $46,950 base price includes destination fees and a whole mess of standard features, including a panoramic glass roof, a power tailgate, dual-zone climate control, power front seats with memory function, satellite radio, Xenon headlamps, rain sensing wipers and a rear-view camera. Under hood sits the brand's turbocharged 2.0-liter I-4, good for a healthy 240 hp and 250 lb-ft of torque. A nine-speed automatic gearbox (the same basic example found in the Jeep Cherokee , among other Fiat Chrysler Automobiles vehicles) handles the cog swapping and a host of off-road ready features, like Hill Descent Control and a Terrain Response System with snow, mud, and sand settings backs up LR's off-road heritage.
