Just three-and-a-half years after its launch in 2015, the Discovery Sport has become the fastest-selling Land Rover in history, with over 350,000 vehicles sold globally so far – 126,078 in 2017 alone.
Just three-and-a-half years after its launch in 2015, the Discovery Sport has become the fastest-selling Land Rover in history, with over 350,000 vehicles sold globally so far – 126,078 in 2017 alone.
Those 2017 sales are the highest-ever single-year sales for any Land Rover vehicle.
The previous fastest-selling Land Rover was the Range Rover Evoque, which took almost five years to sell 500,000 units – a record that the Discovery Sport is on pace to eclipse. By comparison, it took 18 years, from 1948 to 1966, to produce half a million Series Land Rovers!
The two vehicles are built alongside each other at Land Rover’s Halewood plant outside Liverpool, which runs an around-the-clock operation to satisfy demand. In fact, the first vehicle to come off the line on the company’s 70th anniversary on April 30th was a Discovery Sport. This particular vehicle is going to be used in several corporate projects this year, beginning with an upcoming “community resilience project” in Scotland later this month.
The Discovery Sport was launched to replace the Freelander, introduced in Europe in 1997 and the United States in 2002 (with the second generation renamed LR2 in North America due to a poor reputation for quality in the first generation).
Land Rover has aligned their products into three “families” in the past few years – the luxury Range Rover products, the “versatile” Discovery, and the upcoming utilitarian Defender, and thus the Freelander replacement was placed in the Discovery family.
The Discovery Sport sales milestone will be celebrated in certain markets with a special-edition “Landmark” trim level, offered in some special paint and trim combinations.
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