There will be no direct successor to Land Rover's oldest model in the coming years.
The compact family crossover Land Rover Discovery Sport debuted in 2014, based on the D8/PTA platform with a transversely mounted internal combustion engine. The Discovery Sport underwent its first facelift in 2019, gained a plug-in hybrid variant in 2020, and received its second and final facelift in 2023. The Discovery Sport is produced at JLR's plant in Halewood (England, Merseyside) alongside the platform-sharing Range Rover Evoque, which is now in its second generation (in production since 2018).
According to British magazine Autocar, production of the Discovery Sport will end later this year, as the outdated model does not comply with the European Union's new GSR2 safety regulations, the final phase of which came into effect on July 7 this year. In theory, JLR could adapt the Discovery Sport to meet GSR2 standards, but this would increase the cost of the aging crossover, for which demand is already low.
In the first half of this year, according to the company itself, 5,316 units of the Discovery Sport were sold worldwide, a decrease of 32.1% compared to January-June 2025. The Discovery Sport is currently Land Rover's least popular model. For comparison, the Range Rover Evoque sold 13,993 units in the first half of this year (-29.8%), which is also quite modest, but the Evoque is more prestigious and younger, its market potential not yet exhausted. Therefore, the Evoque was adapted to GSR2 regulations, while the Discovery Sport was not.
At the beginning of this decade, JLR planned to launch a new generation of the Discovery Sport on the EMA (Electrified Modular Architecture) platform, meaning the "second" Discovery Sport was intended to be an electric vehicle. However, amid a global slowdown in demand for electric vehicles and a deterioration in JLR's financial health, this project was postponed indefinitely. In other words, a new Discovery Sport is not to be expected in the near future, and the first new model from the company on the EMA platform will be the Range Rover GT cross-liftback, which will hit the market in 2027 and effectively replace the outgoing Discovery Sport on the assembly line at JLR's Halewood plant.
The impending discontinuation of the Discovery Sport once again raises questions about the future of the Discovery brand, which by 2027 will be left with only one flagship model — the fifth-generation Discovery off-roader (according to the official chronology). The Discovery sells only slightly better than the Discovery Sport: in the first half of this year, only 5,736 units were sold (-24%). Two years ago, it was speculated that the "sixth" Discovery would resemble a minivan, but nothing has been heard about that project since. Meanwhile, the Freelander brand, launching in China this year, targets exactly the same audience as the Discovery — family buyers who love travel. How JLR plans to differentiate the Freelander and Discovery in the market remains unclear.
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