Words: Robin Swithinbank
Golly, we’ve had a lot of weather recently. Beastly winds, lashings of rain, and floods that come over the top of our welly boots. Last week firefighters in Northern Ireland even had to rescue a rabbit that had been blown onto a roof by Storm Gertrude. It’s all very serious.
Britain’s post-apocalyptic weather – we’re all doomed – came into sharp focus for me the other day when I drove down to Goodwood to have a nose around its freshly opened Hound Lodge, a sort of upmarket house-party venue for gentrified Londoners.
Travelling in both directions from and to south-west London, I caught the tail end of Storm Jonas, the one that closed every school on the Eastern Seaboard and covered Cumbria in onion soup. It rained a lot. And the roads got very wet. Many people took this as reason to drive down the A3 at 42 miles per hour. Behind a lorry.
I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Although that may have been because I was at the helm of a pimped up long-wheel base Range Rover 3.0L SDV6 Autobiography, a £120,000 beast with the proportions of a three-bed semi and the grunt of a Chinese nuclear power station.
At one point I careered rather absent-mindedly into a small lake that had formed in a hollow somewhere between Haslemere and Midhurst and the whole car disappeared under a wall of brown road spray. The steering wheel barely registered this interruption and the car carried nonchalantly on its way. Had I been in, say, any other car, I’ve no doubt I would have been surfing a wave straight into the nearest sheep pen.
It was at that moment that I realised this car is the future of British motoring. Really. Some day, we’ll all be driving one of these things. Never mind your welly boots, this car’s got 21” wheels and a wading depth of almost a metre (yes, still plenty of British confusion in how Range Rover measures stuff). That should be enough to see us all through the flood. Unless you live in Norfolk. In which case you can set the interior mood lighting to red and panic.
Now, before you have a go at me for praising a gas-guzzling monster and point fingers at it for single-handedly turning Britain into a giant waterpark, you should know this particular Range Rover has a trick up its sleeve – hybrid power. Its power unit is part V6 turbo-diesel and part electric motor.
Driven sensibly and without a bottle of Krug in the onboard cooler, it should therefore report combined fuel consumption figures of 45.6mpg and CO2 emissions of 164g/km. That’s a lot of badger-saving for a car that weighs more than 2.5 tonnes and can sprint from 0-62mph in 6.6 seconds.
Ok, so it’s a bit odd driving a Range Rover in total silence, as the electric motor does its thing at low speeds, and I can’t say I’m totally sold on hybrid technology – all that engine stopping and starting while you’re going along is unsettling, like going to the cinema and sitting in front of a man who clears his throat every time Jennifer Lawrence comes on screen. But if it means I can still get around after the Thames has washed away my sofa, I’ll take Noah’s Ark over anything else any day.
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