Land Rover Discovery receives top honours at The Caravan Club’s Towcar of the Year Awards for 2016
This year’s The Caravan Club Towcar of the Year 2016 Competition’s testing took place in July at the Millbrook Proving Ground in Bedfordshire. Taking home the title of Towcar of the Year 2016, along with wins in two other categories, was the Land Rover Discovery HSE LUX.
The Discovery was awarded the title while also winning the top model in two classes – for all-wheel-drive (AWD) vehicles over 1,800kg and for vehicles priced over £50,000.
At an awards ceremony at the RAC in London, judges gave praise for the model by mentioning its “rock solid stability, master-class hill start, and its electric parking brake, which holds really well and releases automatically when pulling away.”
For this year’s competition, 39 cars were tested by The Caravan Club and carried out by caravan journalists, national motoring journalists, and Caravan Club members. The purpose of this was to provide drivers with ample advice on all their towing needs.
Each car was assessed based on its towing abilities which included acceleration, braking, and coping with hill starts.
Taking home the top spot, and excelling in every category, was the Land Rover Discovery. The Discovery is available with Trailer Stability Assist to detect the presence of a trailer. The program also monitors the trailer when travelling above 37mph and uses selective braking of the appropriate wheels to help correct any problems that come up.
Towing Assist is also available with reversing aid, optional surround camera system, and it predicts the trajectory of the vehicle and trailer which provides aid when coupling a trailer. It also supplies a predicted path for the vehicle on the touch-screen when reverse is selected.
For the awards, manufacturers were invited to submit for testing any vehicle that was capable of towing a trailer over 750kg and would be on sale on 1 October 2015.
The future of towing looked a lot brighter when Land Rover previews its world-first Transparent Trailer and Cargo Sense research concepts earlier this month. Visibility is enhanced with the use of the Transparent Trailer which uses cameras that enable the driver to see-through rendering of the trailer in the rear-view mirror.
Cargo Sense, on the other hand, provides the driver with live data on the condition of storage or livestock during transportation. Details of movement within the cargo area are provided through pressure pads and temperature sensors.
Managing Director of Jaguar Land Rover UK, Jeremy Hicks, has said: “2015 is proving to be another fantastic year for Discovery. It has been at the top of the judge’s lists of capable towing vehicles consistently for the last nine years.
“Along with our recent research concept announcements, we are demonstrating our strong ability to develop ground-breaking technologies that put the needs of our customers first.
“Innovation and capability are cornerstones of our DNA and Discovery continues to lead the way in these areas,” he concluded.
The cars entered were carefully judged to ensure that they conformed to the exact specification declared on the entry documentation. While there were many winners in a selection of categories, as reviewed by CaravanTimes, the Land Rover Discovery HSE LUX proved to be the best of the best for 2016.
