Land Rover Discovery Sport review - Reliability & safety

​Although the updated Land Rover Discovery Sport is a relatively recent model, it shares many parts with the Range Rover Evoque. The Discovery Sport came 49th out of 75 cars overall in our 2023 Driver Power satisfaction survey.

Land Rover Discovery Sport reliability

However, while its headline result was encouraging, the Discovery Sport came 73rd out of 75 cars in the all–important reliability category, which is somewhat less reassuring. Land Rover itself was ranked 14th out of 32 manufacturers in the 2023 brand survey, which – is a fairly impressive improvement on previous years, although a worrying 42% of respondents reported an issue with their Land Rover in the first year.

Land Rover owners ranked the brand last for value for money and running costs, and were unhappy with servicing and insurance costs. By contrast, though, owners are very impressed by the Discovery Sport's comfort, practicality, ride and handling.

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Safety

The previous generation Discovery Sport scored a full five-star rating in Euro NCAP crash-testing in 2014 and did significantly better than the Evoque in the adult, child and pedestrian protection categories. As of yet, the revised Disco Sport has yet to be tested by Euro NCAP.

That said there's no cause for alarm in terms of safety, because of the plentiful amount of safety equipment on the Sport and unlike some brands, Land Rover doesn’t restrict the more advanced kit to the more expensive models.

Standard kit includes automatic emergency braking, which intervenes if it detects a collision is imminent, nine airbags and various electronic stability systems to improve grip. There’s also a pedestrian airbag mounted at the base of the windscreen and two ISOFIX child-seat mounts in the second row.

Land Rover's Terrain Response system is fitted to all models. This allows you to select the type of surface you’re driving on, including snow, sand and rocks, and then adjusts the car accordingly to cope. There’s also hill-descent control, which controls the brakes to stop the Sport running away from you down a steep slope.