If the tax office is asking, they all do an EU-cycle of mid-50s mpg. All are decent modern diesels: sanitary, but uninspiring to drive. Still, you have to be paying attention to notice much difference between these engines. The Mercedes is quicker, but not by much, and it’s also noisiest. Its 190bhp sits neatly between the other two. The BMW is the oldest car but, like the Land Rover, has just got a new modular 2.0-litre engine. It too has a 9spd auto, though it’s non-optional. The GLC 250d has Mercedes’s near-omnipresent 2.1-litre diesel in 204bhp form. Here, it’s in 180bhp tune, running a 9spd autobox. The Land Rover comes with JLR’s 2.0-litre Ingenium engine, which is home-grown and very fresh, having supplanted an older engine only a year into the car’s life.
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Having found that out, team TopGear set off on a much more typical premium SUV journey, beginning on the rural Wilts-Berks border, biting off a nourishing mouthful of B-roads, then settling onto the motorway into London. You can order it with lifting air suspension, raised ground clearance and traction electronics, and then you’ve got something that could probably travel almost as far into the terrain as the Land Rover. The whole GLC shape is relatively sleek and notably aerodynamic, and the test car’s AMG Line trim gives it 19s and a stiffened chassis. The driving position is only just high enough to give you the sense of elevation that draws people to SUVs – the BMW sits you noticeably taller, and the Land Rover higher again. Superficially, the GLC is even more an estate, specifically a C-Class. In our off-road testing, the BMW spun its wheels first, partly because the wide tyres couldn’t cut into mud. Its shallow-walled tyres are unabashedly for the road, the suspension is stiff and the ground clearance merely good enough.
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But well-resolved, deceptively simple exterior styling means it manages not to look like a school hall.Īs a Land Rover, the Discovery Sport has decent off-road chops, equipped as it is with tyres good for gloopy going, and Terrain Response to reconfigure the traction systems and powertrain for various conditions, plus relatively soft springs with plenty of travel and ground clearance.Īs a BMW, the X3 does the opposite, especially in this M Sport trim. Plus its tail end is taller and longer than the others’. It manages this because its engine bay is designed for a transverse four, not a longitudinal straight-six. The Discovery Sport is a packaging miracle compared with the BMW and Mercedes, especially since seats six and seven fold to produce the biggest five-seat boot of this group. That’s despite – or perhaps because of – the third-row pair of seats being more straitjacket than armchair. The ‘car’ part of the Discovery Sport’s job is to be a family wagon. The increasing buyability of SUVs is because they act more like cars, but can still undertake all the off-roading you’d want to do in a vehicle with polished alloys and carpeted interior. Nope, it’s happening because SUV makers are addressing people’s true needs while still allowing them their fantasies. This feature was originally published in the March 2016 issue of Top Gear magazine.
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And if you do live up a green lane, maybe instead spend the price of the SUV on getting it resurfaced? Then your friends can come to visit. And maybe the few who actually liv at the end of the sort of rough tracks pictured here. So the number of people who can truly make use of an SUV remains constant: the caravanners and livestock-trailer owners who tow through fields, mainly. As soon as your high-traction, high-clearance vehicle arrives at the otherwise impassible road, it will find its way blocked by stranded non-SUVs. People still fondly imagine a 4x4 will get them through unexpected snow and floods, but it’s not so. This tectonic shift towards crossovers isn’t happening because people’s needs have changed. Meanwhile BMW will soon have a range that encompasses every X number from 1 to 7. Plus, of course, the mighty GL to provide the pure-bred bedrock that brand Land Rover, in this post-Defender age, sadly lacks. Count ’em: GLA, GLE and GLE Coupe, GLS, plus today’s subject, the GLC (and a GLC coupe to come). At Mercedes they’re breaking out like the hives.
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Three Range Rovers and two Land Rovers is all it has. Suddenly, Land Rover, the great 4x4 specialist, looks a bit short on, er, 4x4s.