Driving the 2015 Land Rover Discovery Sport, the ice land conqueror

In Iceland, tradition tells of elves living in the rocks — huldufolk — and a trial they conduct on the longest night of the year. Sit at a crossroads and wait, and the elves emerge to lure you with good food and gifts. Resist until dawn, which doesn’t arrive until 11 am, and the elfin treasures are yours. Accept anything, and you lose your mind to their control, forever.

It's the kind of legend that illustrates what happens when you live in Iceland, a land of 330,000 people surviving around volcanoes that occasionally awake in rage. The landscape looks like the end of the earth — which it is, since it marks the spot where two continental plates are tearing themselves apart — and there may be no better place to test the wherewithal of a vehicle like the 2015 Land Rover Discovery Sport.

After centuries of fishing for survival — you don’t develop delicacies like rotted fermented shark without a true appreciation of hunger — modern Iceland thrives in large part due to tourism, the transmogrification of lava rocks and geothermic hot water into hard currency. Between its coffee shops, hot-dog stands and friendly people speaking English with a Nordic accent, downtown Reykjavik would make a great Minnesota college town. Never have I seen a place where “love” pops up in so many Wifi passwords.

Here, Land Rovers are fairly common, perhaps even more so than in the United States. The Discovery Sport replaces the LR2 in the United Stats — a new Discovery to usurp the LR4 is a couple of years away — and with it, Land Rover reaches again from the high-dollar Range Rover crowd toward those light-duty SUVers who only go off-roading to park at the pick-your-own orchard. In America, the LR pair have been less Hagar the Horrible and more Lucky Eddie in the face of the Germanic tribes; the combined sales of the Audi Q5 and BMW X3 total roughly 10 times greater than the LR pair.

Under the Discovery Sport's aluminum-and-steel skin sits a modified version of the chassis from the Range Rover Evoque, remixed for maximum passenger space in a smaller package. The exterior design brings some of the drama and modernity of the Range Rover without falling into cute-ute gimmickry. At 180 inches, the Discovery Sport is a wee bit shorter than an Audi Q5 or BMW X3, yet boasts more interior space than either. A new, more compact rear suspension not only allows for rear seats that can slide 6 inches, but an optional third-row for the lítil börn.