Land Rover’s new Discovery, imaginatively named Discovery 4, looks a little like a facelift. It’s got updated light clusters front and rear, new bumpers, and various little nips-and-tucks.

But it isn’t. In fact, it’s a whole new car, and the gents at HQ have honed, fine-tuned, and meticulously recrafted the car based on customer feedback. And part of this feedback was “Don’t you dare change the styling!” So they didn’t.

They’ve had a go at improving just about everything else though. The interior is new and delightfully optimised, the engines are updated, to the beefier 5.0-litre nat-asp V8 and a monster sequential-turbo 3.0-litre diesel churning out thick, planetary wedges of torque – over 600Nm at it’s peak in fact! There’s a new gearbox, new electronic control systems, cool new multiple cameras covering the full 360-degree scope of the car, new tech tidbits… it is in fact an extensive rethink and refine of the already-excellent Disco 3.

And yet, at the launch, two cars got stuck. Properly, comprehensively, “Get the tractor” sort of stuck.

This didn’t really detract from the immense capabilities of the vehicle however. Conditions were such that just about anything you could imagine throwing at the obstacles in question would have done the same. My brother-in-laws notion of “The best car in the world”, a Toyota Land Cruiser, wouldn’t have made it through.

If anything, it suggests that in many ways the new Disco is too good. The Terrain Response Control is so absolutely superb that you get lulled into this sense that anything that comes up before that distinctively bluff nose will be dispatched with wafting, gentle, electronically-assisted ease. It simply seems impossible that the machine could get badly stuck with these systems supporting it.

But physics is as physics does. Although it may sometimes seem to be defying physics, eventually these natural laws have to catch up with it.

For full details on this extensive upgrade of an iconic lineup, read the full Launch Drive in next month’s spectacular digital issue of Drive Magazine.

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