Blog entry: First Drive: 2010 Land Rover Range Rover -- a Gadget Geek’s Dream

The 2010 Land Rover Range Rover is Land Rover's highest tech 4x4 yet, naturally with more cool gadgets than any proceeding Rover.  From Kelowna.com, an interesting first drive review of the Land Rover Range Rover 2010:

Road tests of $100,000-plus luxury sport-utes usually don’t start with effusive ramblings about speedometers. That’s particularly true if the badge on the rear trunk lid says Range Rover and there’s a 510-horsepower supercharged V8 under the hood. On the other hand, Land Rover’s top-of-the-line sport-brute has always had a delectable interior – even if not quite as tasty as in this latest edition – and there’s long been a supercharged V8 on offer – again, if not always quite so powerful.

But the Range Rover – or any other vehicle, for that matter – has never had this kind of digital display. Instead of the traditional separate gauges and idiot lights, there’s just one large TFT (that’s thin film transistor to the geeky ones) display that can be configured in an endless variety of arrangements and permutations.

Land Rover actually takes a fairly conservative approach (the upcoming Jaguar XJ, which uses the same technology, really pushes the envelope on what we can expect from a gauge set), dividing the large screen area into the traditional round speedometer and tachometer gauges. But, oh my, it’s a veritable kaleidoscope of colours and hues. For instance, when you first enter the car, the entire screen displays a Serengeti-like dusk landscape. Flip the Terrain Response button and the screen displays either a picture of the SUV or a neat little histogram revealing where the engine’s torque is being transferred and how.

Read the full article here.