2019 Land Rover Discovery SVX: 518 HP and a Lift Kit

DAVEY G. JOHNSON
Updated

With this debut, Jaguar Land Rover continues its plunder of abandoned three-letter marques with the Land Rover Discovery SVX. A machine fettled by JLR’s Special Vehicle Operations (or SVO, letters once applied to a Ford Mustang) to have greater off-road capability, the SVX is essentially a lifted Disco stuffed with JLR’s supercharged, 518-hp 5.0-liter V-8 for additional roost-throwing mayhem.

The 461-lb-ft monster engine, however, seems like excessive icing on a tasty cake; the real work went into the suspension. Land Rover’s Hydraulic Active Roll Control makes its Discovery debut on the SVX, offering increased wheel articulation. The company also claims that H-ARC improves body control both on and off road, increasing traction in the rough stuff and minimizing body roll on the highway. The lifted air suspension improves approach, departure, and breakover angles, making use of long-travel dampers and new knuckles. 275/55R-20 Goodyear Wranglers find themselves wrapped around 20-inch forged aluminum wheels.

The Discovery SVX also gets a revised version of Land Rover’s Terrain Response 2, which adjusts throttle, brake, and torque distribution for optimal traction in a variety of circumstances. The eight-speed automatic transmission and two-speed transfer case get a unique calibration for this application, and the SVX features a veritable cornucopia of Land Rover’s driver-assistance technologies, including hill-descent control, traction control, stability control, variable-ratio power steering, and LR’s very British-sounding All-Terrain Progress Control. And for those who aren’t fans of the regular Disco’s rotary-knob gear selector, the SVX gets a pistol-grip unit.

All in all, we love the elbow-throwing badger look of the beef-added Discovery, and we imagine that some of the features will trickle down into the lower echelons of the model line as the years go by. Land Rover says that the model on display in Frankfurt is a close preview of the production car that will be handbuilt by SVO starting next year; some minor details may change. The ripping V-8, however, likely will remain the provenance of SVO-tuned Discoveries.