Jaguar Land Rover is working to reposition the Discovery brand for the SUV’s upcoming sixth generation in order for it to have more of its own ‘unique territory’, and be more distinct from the Defender range, reported Autocar.
Having had sales ‘cannibalised’ by the Defender range, the fifth-generation Discovery is the oldest model in the brand’s line-up, having made its debut in September 2016, before it was succeeded by the facelifted version in November 2020.
The Discovery is also the brand’s slowest-selling model with just 16,750 units sold globally last year, or nearly half the sales volume achieved by its rangemate the Discovery Sport.
This makes the Discovery range’s contribution just 4% of overall Jaguar Land Rover sales, though the group is committed to bringing the model back for another generation, and the group will have a greater focus on defining the Discovery’s positioning as a ‘family adventures’ model, wrote Autocar.
The cannibalising of sales from the Discovery range by the Defender range is due to the comparable refinement of the latter, while offering a wider range of engines, trim levels and body sizes, and the Defender had attained sales of 110,367 units in 2023, or several times that of the Discovery last year, according to Discovery and Defender brands chief Mark Cameron.
“If you look from a product perspective, [the] Defender came in and sat quite squarely on top of Discovery and cannibalised a lot of that business,” Cameron told Autocar. The new direction for the next-generation Discovery could adopt some MPV design elements, and the Volkswagen ID Buzz has been cited as a potential reference, according to the site.
Making the Discovery brand its own entity could give it a new lease of life, as all JLR brands are currently unintentionally competing with each other due to their shared retail footprint, Cameron said.
The next, sixth-generation Discovery is likely to be underpinned by the group’s MLA platform which forms the basis of the current, fifth-generation L460 Range Rover which offers both combustion-based and fully electric powertrain setups.
At the upper end of the product spectrum, the next Discovery is set to gain a new halo model, one that is being developed by the group’s SVO bespoke division that has been responsible for the Defender Octa and the Range Rover SV.
This flagship version of the next Discovery will have its own bespoke performance nameplate, and it will have “its own special interpretation of what flagship means” for the Discovery brand, said SVO chief Jamal Hameedi.
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