More grit for pavement pounding.(Land Rover Discovery 4.6)(Brief Article)(Evaluation)

Ah, merry old England. Not only has that indomitable little land given us such glorious gifts as imperial weights and measures and the English language, it also spawned such confounding cultural references as Marmite, Shakespeare (admit it, you don't understand him that well), right-hand drive and Land Rover.

What's so confounding about Land Rover, you ask? Certainly not the abilities of its vehicles. We've personally witnessed Land Rovers at work on glaciers in Iceland and the sands of Africa, terrain for which the vehicles have been bred for generations.

On these shores, however, most owners have relegated the desert crawler to more, shall we say, genteel duty, shuffling well-groomed upper crusters about a sort of suburban Serengeti. While we understand that fighting for a parking spot at Nordstrom's Half Yearly Sale can be tough work, we're not convinced that's what the engineers at Solihull had in mind.

Nonetheless, the folks at Land Rover continue to engineer its vehicles for all sorts of tasks, and the third-generation Discovery is no exception.

While an all-new Discovery still sits a few years off, for 2003 Land Rover has given the vehicle a bigger engine, revised the suspension, made minor updates on the interior and given its front end a treatment similar to the newly redesigned Range Rover.

Land Rover replaced the Discovery's 4.0-liter V8 with a bigger, all-aluminum 4.6-liter V8. This hand-me-down from the old Range Rover 4.6 HSE (the new Range Rover gets BMW power) pumps out 15 percent more horsepower than the 4.0 on which it's based. The Discovery 4.6 puts out 217 horsepower at 4750 rpm and 300 lb-ft of torque at just 2600 rpm, and Land Rover claims the vehicle will run 0 to 60 mph in 9.5 seconds. Not bad considering the Discovery 4.6's almost two and a half tons of heft, or the fact that the vehicle's real strengths emerge at much lower speeds.

For such an old engine (``well-proven,'' says the Land Rover literature), the 4.6 runs surprisingly smoothly, helped out by a beautifully shifting electronically controlled four-speed automatic transmission. And getting through the rough stuff is made easy by the Discovery 4.6's standard permanent, two-speed four-wheel-drive system and Four-wheel Electronic Traction Control (4ETC). So long as just one wheel remains in good contact with the ground, the 4ETC will almost assuredly get the vehicle through whatever off-road mess it gets into.