How Land Rover Discovery can be reborn for the EV era

JLR says it needs to completely reinvent the Land Rover Discovery for its fourth decade and is starting from a clean sheet.

However, with it vying for space alongside the Defender, Range Rover and to a lesser extent Jaguar, this looks like a significant task.

It was hard not to raise an eyebrow when JLR’s new CEO, Adrian Mardell, told Autocar in August that one of the company’s four “brand pillars” was about to undergo a complete rethink.

“The [brand] equity in Discovery is less today, and lots of people have lots of views on why that might be,” he said. “They’re interesting, but they’re only interesting if they’re informative about what [we] do next. We need a dedicated think tank to do that. I’m a great believer in deep and meaningful thinking and giving people the time to do that.”

For keen JLR watchers, Mardell’s revelation was something of a surprise. In June, the company gave a mammoth presentation to investors, announcing the business was going to be reworked as a “house of brands” – four of them, to be precise.

Defender was described as “embracing the impossible… for adventurous audiences”; Jaguar as “a radical, modern luxury EV brand… the modern luxury experience that is a copy of nothing”; Range Rover as “the peerless leader in modern luxury, delivering the exceptional for the most discerning clients”; and Discovery as “delivering luxurious versatility… delighting new family audiences”.

Clearly, that description of Discovery wasn’t quite detailed enough for the new CEO. Indeed, when Autocar asked, just three months after the presentation, if Discovery could be distilled, as the new Jaguar brand has been, into just four words, he said: “It may not do so, as I haven’t got the four words I’m looking for. ‘Family’ is most likely to be one of them. ‘Space’ is likely to be one of them.

"But it’s not for me to create these words, it’s for the experts. It’s for me as a layperson to say they’ve nailed it. We haven’t got to that point yet.”

JLR’s UK managing director, Patrick McGillycuddy, added: “Discovery is an important brand, and it has absolute equity, it has space in the market and it has a very loyal customer base. What we’re going through now is understanding how we reimagine the Discovery brand. What space will it fill?”

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Discovery needs a much deeper rethink, along the lines of the one that Jaguar has already undergone – a reflection of both the recent sales performance of the two Discovery models and the effects of the success of the Defender and the likely introduction of a Defender Sport compact EV.

Sales of the current, seven-year-old Discovery – which is radically different to its predecessors – have hardly set the world alight. In the 12 months between March 2022 and March 2023, just over 12,000 units left JLR’s factory in Slovakia. By contrast, 75,000 examples of the Defender, its sister car at Nitra, were sold.

The long slide started in 2019, when 41,000 Discoverys were sold. In 2020, the total was just 33,600. Of course, JLR was still suffering from the global chip shortage and Covid shutdowns, and it was clearly going to prioritise Defender production.

But even so, insiders say it’s clear that the Defender – which is much closer in spirit to the previous generations of Discovery – is taking significant sales from its range-mate.

The smaller Land Rover Discovery Sport, which is now eight years old (although it did receive a comprehensive update in 2019) is also fading fast.

Between March 2022 and March 2023, sales fell to around 36,000, after 88,000 were sold in 2019 and 75,000 in 2020. Again, it was a victim of the chip shortage, age and new challengers.

Clearly, the Discovery line – which did so much to boost Land Rover’s fortunes when it was born in 1989 – is suffering a mid-life crisis. The polarising Mk5 Discovery has been torpedoed by the new Defender and the Discovery Sport is aged and facing huge competition.