TO underline the sheer versatility and engineering depth found in its cars, Land Rover has put one of its high-performance Range Rover Sport SVR models through a series of unusual acceleration tests.
The car's quoted 0-60mph time is 4.5 seconds - hugely impressive for such a large vehicle, albeit one that also costs almost £100,000 and packs a 542bhp supercharged V8 under its bonnet - but that figure is achieved on dry tarmac.
Clean, dry tarmac doesn't really give any modern car much of a challenge when it comes to setting acceleration times - but what about surfaces such as grass, snow and sand?
Taking the metric 0-100kmh - equivalent to 0-62mph - as its benchmark, the Range Rover Sport SVR set a time of 4.7 seconds on dry asphalt.
On grass, the time was 5.5 seconds, on gravel it was 5.3 seconds, in mud it recorded 6.5 seconds and even on sand, the SVR stopped the watch in 5.5 seconds. On snow, it took 11.3 seconds.
The computer chips and various automatic gearbox, throttle, traction control and stability gubbins that Range Rover packages in its so-called 'Terrain Response 2' system help it find such remarkable grip on slippery, tricky surfaces.
