By: Theo Ford-Sagers via http://www.lro.com/
To show off the towing capability of the hybrid Range Rover Sport, Land Rover recently teamed up with Airstream, purveyor of the luxurious ‘silver bullet’ caravans, for an epic Scandinavian voyage.
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This is just what happens when the Sport goes into hybrid mode.
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Destination: Arjeplog, Sweden (where Land Rover oeprates a cold-weather testing facility) then on to the Arctic Circle.
As luck would have it, the Scandinavian weather was atrocious, so the hybrid Sport and its 2.5-tonne trailer encountered abnormally icy roads, Arctic gales and record snow depths on its 2500-mile adventure. ‘We were closely watching the long range weather forecasts before we set off but nothing prepared us for how bad it got,’ says team Ben Samuelson.
Girding of loins… and a luxury caravan
The team set off from Land Rover’s Design and Engineering Centre at Gaydon, and drove to Airstream’s HQ in Germany to pick up their flagship Airstream 684 caravan, which had been specially winterised for the journey.
Described as ‘8.25m of boutique hotel suite on wheels, with two double beds, satellite television and Corian surfaces in both its fully-equipped kitchen and spacious bathroom’ that caravan is quite a beast.
The right tools for the job
En route, the team crossed the five-mile long Øresund Bridge between Denmark and Sweden in the teeth of a Hurricane - a good opportunity to test the Range Rover Sport’s 'Trailer Stability Assist', which can brake the car’s wheels individually to counteract sway, preventing catastrophe.
Further north, temperatures fell as low as to -22 degrees centigrade, putting the Range Rover Sport through its paces as it pulled the Airstream along steep icy roads and forest tracks.
Phil Talboys, who manages the Arjeplog test facility, commented afterwards: ‘This journey just goes to show that the Range Rover Sport Hybrid is pure hybrid – with all the capability and versatility that you’d expect from a Land Rover.’
Find out more about the Hybrid Range Rover Sport
Check out the final page of LRO’s current April issue, where Editor Mike Goodbun sets a hybrid Range Rover Sport against our Real World Test. In fact, it's the very same Range Rover Sport!
Feeling flush and want a Range Rover Sport for your own? Click here to browse some for sale on LRO.com
