Test Out a LandRover for a Month!

Test Out a LandRover for a Month!

Early last year, multiple Tour de France winner Chris Froome posted an extraordinary ride on the exercise-tracking app Strava. Starting from his home near Johannesburg he rode for 270km at an average of 45km/h (us cyclists always use kilometres – it sounds further and faster) before the Team Sky staff in the car following him swept up his dessicated remains and drove him home.

That's 28mph, for six hours. On a bicycle. Nobody looks at that Strava post and thinks 'that's a good idea' – except, it seems, me. Froome titled his ride 'Emptying the tank', and apparently there's some good training reason for bleeding every last joule of energy from your body. I just thought it would be 'fun' to ride with some friends north from Brighton, where we live, until we dropped, and see where that happened. I guessed we might manage a similar distance to Froome, but a lot more slowly.The car is a crucial part of this. You don't know where you're going to run out of juice, and the idea of cycling another 10 miles to a train station after you've 'bonked' may be impossible. You can ride light, with all your spares in the car, and have proper nutrition in a coolbox rather than relying on cafés.

My Discovery with a three-bike rack fitted to its retractable tow bar was the car for the job. I just needed three friends: two to ride with and one to drive. So I got on WhatsApp one evening (so many bad things start on WhatsApp after dark) and recruited photographer Alex Tapley to drive and document, and Raya Hubbell and Stephen Grant to ride with. Raya is a Team GB triathlete and coach, a former world-class skier and an Instagram star. She's ideally suited to a ride like this. Old friend Stephen isn't. He's a stand-up comedian and a strong rider, but Lord, can he whinge.

I'd plotted a route that took us on mostly quiet, scenic roads from Brighton towards Birmingham, skirting the eastern edge of Brum and finishing after 300km in the hamlet of Foul End, which seemed appropriate given the likely state of our personal hygiene by then. But it was raining in Brighton that morning, and it was hard to get out of the Disco's heated leather seats. I'm all for riding in all conditions, but if you're on the pedals all day it's best to avoid a soaking at the start.

So it was well past our planned departure time when I finally demounted the bikes next to the Palace Pier. Mounting them had been nerve-wracking. I'm relaxed about hanging my own bikes off the back, but with Raya's £8k Specialized Tarmac training bike (her Shiv competition bike is £11k) and a rather humbler Canyon Endurance apiece for Stephen and me, there was 13 grand's worth of bike back there. I'm not sure how the rack grips so securely around the ball of the tow hook, but I'm bloody glad it does.I spent three days last month driving four premium electric crossovers: Mercedes EQC, Audi e-Tron, Jag i-Pace and the now venerable Tesla Model X.

The Discovery, which competes with them on price, conveyed me between them and yes, each time I got back in it felt like what Elon once described to me as 'an explosion-powered death machine'.

I can't be too hard on the Disco for still having an ICE engine, though, and even the Model X can't match the Disco's village hall of a boot. But I can criticise my car's infotainment system, which feels clunky by comparison with the best. With a fill-up now regularly over £100, I wonder how strong my attachment to that boot is.