ONELIFE #33 – American English

OBJECT 06:
BOOTS
Dan Dennehy’s boots have stepped out of a prototype
Discovery onto every possible terrain and into some of
the harshest conditions on the planet. He’s the Land Rover
engineer tasked with ensuring that the All-New Discovery
really can rove the land. That ability is central to the car’s
DNA and its appeal to customers, and it has to do it better
than its rivals.
So Dan travels. His job starts at Land Rover HQ, defining
what the new model’s critical dimensions should be for
optimum capability: its approach, breakover and departure
angles; its wading depth and side-slope angle. Then the car is
modeled virtually, and those angles checked. The advanced
virtual engineering software can even calculate what sort
of traction it will generate on different surfaces, and what
gradient it will be able to haul itself up.
But even the most powerful virtual modeling will never
replace real-world testing. So prototype vehicles are flown to
the sands of Dubai and the boulders of the western United
States, and driven to the snowy terrain of northern Sweden
and the mud, grass and ruts of Land Rover’s UK test base
at Eastnor Castle. “We don’t need to travel for mud,” Dan
says. “We have plenty of that at home.” The teams testing
the performance of the engines on the road and in extreme
temperatures taking the prototypes on a long tour of other,
equally remote and difficult parts of the world.
“These guys really put their heart and soul into these
cars,” says Alex Heslop, Chief Engineer. “They’re incredibly
passionate about what the Discovery stands for. If they weren’t,
they wouldn’t volunteer for three weeks’ duty in the Arctic,
verifying that it deserves the name.”
That dedication pays off. “We’ve made some huge leaps
in specific abilities with the new Discovery,” says Dan. “But I
think the real achievement has been making it more premium
and refined, and at the same time making it more capable
off-road, too. We’ve tried to really improve its performance
on every kind of terrain.”
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