More than 20,000 people have already put their names down for this Land Rover.

Land Rover’s new Discovery is a far prettier car than any of its famous predecessors over the past 27 years, as long as you only look at it from front on. It is also an iron fist in a velvety glove; a vehicle so luxurious and refined that it gives few hints at how astonishingly capable it still is off-road.

Its long-term fans will be happy to hear its DNA remains unchanged, and keen to join the 20,000 people worldwide who have already put their names down to buy one. But the introduction of new, frugal four-cylinder models will also widen the appeal of this bulky SUV – now with the option of a genuine, full-size seven seat configuration – to inner-city dwellers, and soccer mums.

Price and features

There’s no denying the enticing entry price for the new Discovery; just $65,960, seems like it’s offering a whopping amount of car for the dollars – almost 5m long, going on 2m tall, luxurious, spacious and modernly appointed inside with an ambience that feels very close to Range Rover levels.

But that price only gets you five seats (the third row is a $3400 option), deletes the excellent air suspension that’s standard on every model above the base, and leaves you without the truly ingenious ‘Terrain Response 2’ system (a $2060 extra spend on all Discovery models but the top-spec First Edition, which costs a hefty $132,560), which turns this car into an effortless off-road conqueror.

It’s fair to say the large group of people who will buy a Discovery simply to shuttle children around big cities don’t need to spend the extra on a system that will help them drive up cliffs, down sand dunes or through muddy ruts, big enough to hide a full-grown Joe Hockey (all of which the Discovery did for us at its launch in Utah and Arizona this week).

Those city-dwellers might also be happy to settle for the 2.0-litre, four-cylinder diesel engine that's asked to haul the 2099kg base model around, with just 132kW/430Nm at its disposal.

In short, the Discovery looks like a bargain, until you look a bit closer.

Pricey options abound, and realistically, if you want the most driveable, long-distance friendly, seven seat version, you’re going to be wanting the 3.0-litre V6 diesel, which starts at $84,960. Step up to the more-like-it, and more lovely, HSE spec and you’re looking at $117,750.

You could argue that it’s still a lot of car, and a lot of capability, for the money - and it does feel worth a six-figure spend with the V6 - but a bargain it is not. Still, that hardly makes it unique amongst large, European SUVs.

Practicality

One of the biggest lies ever told by car companies, right up there with 'dieselgate' and “we never gouge people on options, or metallic paint” is the phrase “genuine seven-seater."

The Discovery puts the lie to the liars, however, with a layout that genuinely can fit seven adults in what even a six-footer would call comfort. Head room, even in the usually tortuous third row, is excellent, and with a bit of negotiating with the passengers in the middle row - who can slide their seats forward and adjust the tilt angle of their seat backs - even leg room is impressive, while the cushion also betters those found in standard rear pews on lesser cars.

While it’s true that carrying seven people reduces your boot space to roughly the volume of an Esky (258 litres), with five people on board the luggage space is a voluminous 1231 litres, or you can have a cavernous 2500 litres of flat-floored load area by dropping the middle row as well.

Configuring the seats is a breeze, using either the handy electronic buttons or the app on your phone, which allows you to adjust them from wherever you might be in the world. Which will be annoying for your family if they’re out driving and you’re in the Bahamas. Fortunately the “intelligent” seats, which use artificial intelligence and weight sensors, can tell if there’s something on them, and will stop moving before anything is crushed.

Adding to all this practicality is “an obsession with storage”, that sees no less than 21 separate storage areas, including two American-sized cup holders in the centre console and more in each door, a storage area for four iPads in a central cubby, more iPad storage on seatbacks, a clever hidden area behind the ingenious fold-down air-conditioning controls, nine USB ports and six 12-volt charging points, and a wet-storage area under the rear loading floor.

There’s also a powered rear tailgate, which you can sit on to change your “Wellingtons”, or just your shoes, or to watch the polo.

A family could very nearly move into the new Discovery, particularly if you go for the optional fridge between the front seats.

Design

While the interior beauty and utility are hard to fault, the decision to make the new Discovery a genuine seven seater in terms of headroom, even if you choose the five seat version, has created a heavy handed, or at least heavy-backsided, look for the new Discovery.

While it is, undeniably, the most beautiful Discovery ever - a car that is now in its fifth generation, after some almost wilfully unattractive earlier versions - the attractive roundness of the front end is somewhat spoiled by the rear porch tacked on to accommodate those occasional third-row passengers.

There’s no avoiding it, unless you only ever look at the car entirely front on, and there’s no denying the fact that it spoils the otherwise clean lines, and makes the rear three-quarter look in particular, mildly disturbing.

Standing as tall as it does, the Discovery also looks huge from behind, and the asymmetric shape of the rear number-plate surround also has its critics.

Land Rover’s chief designer, Gerry McGovern, was keen to point out that all his critics are wrong, and that their whinging won’t stop anyone buying the car.

“I could be quite glib about it, because I’m a professional designer and they’re not, but I think it hangs together really well,” he said at the car’s global launch in Utah this week.

“It is a big challenge, when you’re doing a vehicle of this size, for seven full-size adults. To do that successfully and get a vehicle that’s well proportioned, and still make it look like it’s dramatic, that is a very difficult task.”

We’d agree, because the final result certainly looks like it had a difficult birth. Possibly a breach.

Engine and transmission

Putting a four cylinder engine in a car the size of a small house would have seemed like the height of bonkers just a few years ago, but Land Rover has ripped so much weight out of the Discovery, thanks to the use of lightweight aluminium (dropping the kerb weight by 20 per cent to a still substantial 2099kg, or 2223kg with the V6), that it almost makes sense.

While it might seem brave, the company wasn’t quite bold enough to let the world’s media drive its base model Td4, which, with just 132kW/430Nm, might be described as pushing sheet (metal) uphill.

It remains to be seen whether that powerplant is up to the job, but the other, more generously powered 2.0-litre diesel we drove genuinely surprised with its ability to keep all that Discovery rolling.

The 2.0-litre diesel Sd4, which makes 177kW/500Nm and starts at $65,960, is an engine that’s being asked to work very hard indeed. Fortunately the noise suppression in the Disco is so good you never hear it grumbling about it. And while it’s never going to set the world on fire with its performance, it’s no slug, posting an 8.3 second time for the 0-100km/h dash (more than two seconds faster than the low-powered Td4), not that such times matter at all to the kind of people who will buy this version to drive their kids to school.

Smash your foot flat out on the highway to overtake someone at 110km/h and you’ll have to wait a few moments while the engine does its 'I think I can, I think I can' thing, but it’s certainly not so gutless that you wouldn’t put up with it, although it would be interesting to see how it performed with seven people on board.

The more attractive option, obviously, is the range-topping 3.0-litre TdV6, which bumps you up to 190kW/600Nm.

It’s only a smudge quicker to 100, at 8.1 seconds, but it’s the extra torque that you appreciate all the time. Take the big beast seriously off-road, as we did at the global unveiling in Utah, and it comes in particularly handy for driving you up sand dunes or through bogs.

Once again, it’s a surprisingly quiet, even pleasant sounding diesel, and while it’s hardly a sporty engine (the petrol V6 offered overseas no doubt provides that excitement, but it won’t be coming here), it’s almost a perfect match to this Discovery.

Fuel consumption

All the weight-saving (the new Disco is 20 per cent lighter - weighing between 2099 and 2223kg, depending on engine - than the old one, largely due to its aluminium construction) and associated downsizing of engines are part of the same drive for more economical fuel figures. Not just because people want them, but because intelligent, forward-thinking, non-climate-change-denying lawmakers in Europe demand them.

The base Td4 might struggle to get up hills, but it does offer a claimed figure of 6.3L/100km, which is really quite astonishing for a car of this size, and off-road cred. How close it would get to that figure if you actually took it off road with six of your friends on board would be an interesting experiment.

The Sd4 is pretty close behind with its figure of 6.5L/100km, while even the V6 manages 7.2. They are figures that make the whole ownership proposition of a giant Land Rover seem more realistic than ever.

Driving

There’s something quite surreal about driving the new Discovery, particularly off-road, because it can literally feel like you’re not doing anything at all.

At one point during our action-packed, sand-blasting, mud-mining, cliff-climbing launch drive we managed to clamber up a series of boulders like a huge mountain goat, while I sat at the wheel with my feet flat on the floor, barely have any input into the experience.

We were encouraged to try out 'All Terrain Progress Control', which is basically cruise-control for off-roading, which seems a bit like buying an autonomous fishing rod or a self-pitching tent.

Tell the Disco what you want it to do by switching to the rock-climbing setting on the Terrain Response 2 controller (a $2060 option that turns your Land Rover into an effortless go-anywhere machine and one of those options that city dwellers definitely don’t need, but will buy anyway for brag value), set the speed you want to climb at using the cruise control buttons, sit back and watch.

The Discovery slowly but surely pulled us up these whopping boulders, with the barest of steering inputs from me, apportioning the torque to the wheel where it was needed, and even coming to a complete stop occasionally to scratch its electronic beard and wonder where to go next.

Yes, it was easy - and it’s just as easy to leave the Terrain Response 2 controller in Auto, in which setting it senses what kind of surface you’re on and how much grip you’ve got 100 times a second and adjusts accordingly - but it didn’t make me feel very manly.

Fortunately, driving up and down sand dunes is a more involving, sideways-sliding, shouting and smiling kind of off-roading, and the Discovery easily excelled at this as well, only allowing us to get completely jack-knifed and bogged on one occasion.

It may not look like it, or feel like it when you’re in the luxurious and quiet cabin, but this Discovery really is a proper Land Rover, with enormous capability.

Out on the road, the sense of unreality continues, because the combination of air suspension (standard on all but the entry model), a slick eight-speed automatic transmission and steering that feels a touch light and effortless for such a huge machine, makes it feel almost too easy to drive.

You can hustle it through corners without a hint of understeer or bad behaviour, but you can’t avoid the sensation of all that mass, and that height in particular, wanting to roll.

The comfortable and supportive seats do hold you in place, though, while your back-seat passengers roll around and complain slightly more.

The goal of the engineers seems to have been to make this Discovery much easier to drive than you would think by looking at it - and various pieces of self-parking and even automatic trailer-reversing tech add to that ease - and they’ve absolutely nailed it.

Safety

Auto Emergency Braking with pedestrian detection is standard, as is Lane Keep Assist. You also get driver and passenger airbags, thorax front side airbags and side curtain airbags, which extend to the third row of seating if you’ve taken that option. Crash testing is yet to be carried out by ANCAP.

Ownership

Warranty on the Discovery will be five years/100,000km, and the company also plans to offer fixed-price servicing for five years, at a cost of roughly $1400.

The Land Rover Discovery has never been a pretty car, so even with its unfortunate duck-billed roof, the styling of this new model is a huge step forward, which is partly why Land Rover has been swamped with orders from people around the world who haven't even driven one yet, including more than 400 Australians who’ve slapped down deposits.

Previous Disco owners who told the company they wanted a more Range Rover-like, classy interior won’t be disappointed, either, because it really is lovely inside, and there’s nothing utilitarian about it.

Those people who really want a car that can carry seven adults, or five very large children, in genuine comfort will also be very happy with the designers’ focus on making this happen, even at the expense of overall beauty. Those who only want a five-seat version might be upset that they have to put up with that heavy rear end look.

What everyone will love is how easy it is to drive and what a pleasant place it is to spend time in. It’s hard to imagine a better or more comfortable vehicle for blasting across a country in.

And those few people who buy a Discovery to go absolutely hog wild in creek beds, sand dunes or swamps will find that it’s lost nothing of its legendary off-road toughness.

It remains to be seen whether the base model will be worth buying, and early adopters will all go for the V6 anyway, but the availability of cheaper, four-cylinder models will surely grow the market among inner-city families who want to look rich and gigantic when doing the school run.

Does a lower cost of entry put the Land Rover Disco on your radar? Tell us what you think in the comments below.

This story originally appeared on CarsGuide