Car News

The 5 Things You Need to Know about the 2018 Land Rover Discovery

12 Jul 2017

Isaac Bober 1

Room to move

With all seven seats in use, there’s 258 litres of storage space in the boot which won’t be enough for the luggage of all seven people, but it’ll be more than enough room for the weekly shop. Dropping just one of the two seats in the third row liberates 698 litres of space, growing to a huge 1137 litres with the third-row folded flat into the floor.

There’ll be those moaning about the loss of the split tailgate of the previous model Discovery, but to keep them happy there’s a luggage holder which can be folded down electrically to form a bench which will hold 300kg.

Folding the third-row seats down can be done from the rear of the vehicle via buttons on the left-hand side or, if you plump for the top-spec infotainment and connectivity package, via an app from your phone. The third-row seats fold flat into the floor with four sturdy eyelets in each corner of the boot.

You can also add heated seats for all three rows for $2490 and you can get intelligent folding seats which means you only have to press a button and they’ll fold or raise automatically, for $1140.00. This is standard on the First Edition variant.

In the third-row my six-foot frame was accommodated comfortably even with the second-row seats pushed back towards the rear. The second-row seats slide forwards and backwards. Headroom is okay and there’s decent elbowroom even with two people in the third-row, but it doesn’t feel as airy in the back as the third-row did in Discovery 4. And I didn’t think there was as much foot room in the second row as before.

There are 21 different storage areas containing a total 45 litres of space, two metres of load length and 1.4 metres of load width. The true 40:20:40 split fold system has been lost, which was a strong point of the old Discovery’s interior.

Storage areas for front-seat passengers:

• Upper (1.4 litres) and lower (1.1 litres) instrument panel stowage;
• Upper (4.8 litres) and lower (6.9 litres) glove boxes;
• Front (6.2 litres), mid (5.6 litres) and rear (1.2 litres) centre console stowage;
• Row 3 cubby boxes – 2.6 litres in total; and
• Door stowage areas (front and rear, upper and lower) – 14.6 litres in total.