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RPM TV Website | March 22, 2024

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High-tech Discovery 5 set to tackle premium segment

Land Rover Discovery 5 Land Rover Discovery 5 Land Rover Discovery 5
Adam Schoeman

Land Rover has revealed some of the technology that will be available on the Discovery 5 when it is released in 18 months time, and how it will be used to position the SUV.

While the Discovery 4 has always had a strong following locally, it has been losing ground internationally to the more luxury-focused SUVs, particularly BMW’s X5.

This is something that Land Rover is looking at addressing when the replacement Discovery is released in 2016, and it’s planning to deploy a suite of technologies to achieve this.

Leading the way is a new chassis based on the bonded and riveted aluminium monocoque of the Range Rover and Range Rover Sport, which should give the Discovery a much needed reduction in weight.

Land Rover Discovery 5

Land Rover Discovery 5

The Discovery’s class-leading suspension will be augmented with the possible use of laser scanning technology, which would read the terrain ahead of the vehicle and make adjustments to the suspension and ESP accordingly.

Lasers will also be used inside the car, as projectors, which would be able to project images on the windscreen, giving new uses to a heads up display (HUD) because of the higher resolution.

This technology has already been shown on Land Rover’s prototype ‘transparent bonnet’ concept which projects an image of what is under the car on the windscreen, but orientates the overlay in such a way that it looks like the bonnet is invisible.

Land Rover Discovery 5

Land Rover Discovery 5

Land Rover has also intimated that it might use lasers as parking and general manoeuvring guides, which could draw the Disco’s dimensions on the road. The idea is that lasers will draw the vehicle’s width, indicating to the driver whether it would be possible to fit into a space.

For those particularly tight spaces where opening and closing doors would be problematic, there is Remote Drive, which would allow the driver to disembark the vehicle, and then send the car off to park itself automatically.

Science fiction? Perhaps for now, but it looks like fiction will turn to fact by 2016 …

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