February 2019 Issue #26 February 2019 Issue #26 | Page 65

That’s an impressive number, but the laws of physics are immutable. Once the
battery charge is depleted, the PHEV Range Rover’s efficiency advantage fades
fast. A 500-mile (805-km) road trip that included a mixture of suburban running,
fast freeway, and flowing two-lanes saw the hybrid Rangie average between 19
mpg (12.4 L/100km) and 22 mpg (10.7 L/100km), about what we’ve seen from
V-6 models under similar conditions. The Sport Td6 on our long-term fleet last
year would routinely return 26 mpg (9 L/100km) or better on a road trip and aver-
aged 24 mpg (9.8 L/100km) over the 27,000 miles (43,452 km) we ran it.
Bottom line: The Range Rover Sport P400e makes sense if you live in a con-
gested urban or suburban area, can recharge it overnight, and most of your trips
are relatively short. There’s just one giant caveat, however. The $5,950 USD you
could save buying an identically equipped Sport powered by the 340-hp super-
charged V-6 would buy—at the time of writing—about 1,800 gallons of premium
unleaded gas, enough to take it 30,600 miles (49,246 km), based on official EPA
city fuel consumption numbers.
Statistics show Americans drive, on average, just 13,467 miles (21,673 km) a
year. You do the math.
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