Range Rover Sport SV vs Mach-E Rally vs G450d
Four hundred grand, 7.5 tonnes, 1,700lb ft of torque - one winner
While hot hatches and sports cars are becoming conspicuous for their absence in many lineups, the fast SUV, fed by buyer infatuation, continues to bloom like algae. For fans of flyweight machinery with the poise of a pond skater, it has been a maddening decade. But if you like your cars high-sided and heroically powerful - and containing no shortage of creature comforts - the choice is endless. And because this is 2025 and we’re now just ten years (supposedly) from a combustion cliff edge, the Gump-sized SUV variety box currently extends not just to makes and models and budget, but means of propulsion, too.
Welcome, then, to a car park atop the 561-metre summit of Blorenge, and a three-horse(power) race. If people are willing to spend six figures on an SUV (and rest assured, they will queue up to do so), which offers the most compelling means to an appropriately entertaining end: petrol, diesel or EV? Represented in this case by the £175k Range Rover Sport SV, the £140k Mercedes G450d and the £70k Ford Mustang Mach-E Rally, respectively. Or, if you prefer, a 635hp 4.4-litre V8; a 367hp 3.0-litre inline-six; and 487hp from dual AC synchronous electric motors and a 99kWh battery.
Tough break for Ford, eh? Fairer, perhaps, to have waited for the incoming Porsche Cayenne Electric - or uncorked the 639hp you get from the £96k Macan Turbo. But we’re trying to lean into the ‘fun’ here, and if ever there was an EV with its tongue wedged into its cheek, it’s a Mach-E GT with the £2,250 Rally Pack optioned. In fact, with its Lego-style roof spoiler and £1,150 Grabber Yellow paint job, it brings to mind many other laudably silly things the Blue Oval has previously seen fit to build. No sane person is going to mistake it for an upmarket SUV - but in south Wales, where they still have an awful lot of time for bonnet stripes and white OZ rims, it does not seem out of place.
The same could not be said for the SV. Memory of the first Range Rover Sport, the L320, seems as distant now as Euro ’96 - despite the fact that the car didn’t launch till the following decade. Famously, it shared the Discovery chassis and a not dissimilar mindset; the L461, chin heavy and remarkably low on its haunches, shares its platform with the Range Rover and its styling ethos with a wireless charger. With its black contrast roof and ‘forged carbon’ details, among so many camper vans and dog walkers, the recently launched Edition Two seems every bit as bling as a Palm Jumeirah frond.
Partly this is about those ginormous 23-inch forged alloys, which are made to seem bigger still by the proximity of the vast matte blue body. A fact amplified by the faux utilitarian presence of the G-Class, in £4k of Olive Metallic, itself on 20-inch wheels, yet managing to make them look like 18s courtesy of a much more generous tyre wall and that pill box of a body perched on top. To say the current G-wagen looks traditionally proportioned when parked next to the SV is to indulge in lurid understatement: the Mercedes harks from the tail end of another century, and is proud of it.
Of course, despite its clever persistence with body-on-frame construction, no one would think to characterise the G-Class as an anti-fast SUV because its maker has always gone to great lengths to ensure that each successive derivative is impressively quick. Nevertheless, while the SV glints in the sunshine, and looks like it knows what to do with more than 600hp, the G450d is no more suggestive of speed than your average tractor. Or at least it is when you’ve deliberately skipped over the glitzy G63 and really very good G500, and landed on the supposedly humblest model. Or at any rate the cheapest.
Not that you’d guess it from the vault-like clank of the driver’s door or the (optional) Nappa leather of the seats or the open-pore walnut trim or perceived build quality that lives up to Mercedes’ stronger than time mantra. The G450d is like a very expensive Leatherman: ostensibly it’s made from high-grade stainless steel for functional reasons - but it’s also because it feels wonderfully weighty to hold and look at. There’s no shortage of plastic and parts bin switchgear if you go looking for it, and not everyone is a fan of idiosyncrasies or its upright driving position. But it’s my favourite Mercedes to sit in by a country mile.
The Mach-E is not my favourite Ford. The sight of the Mustang logo on the steering wheel rankles, even five years later. The infotainment touchscreen is still needlessly large, and somehow manages to seem fiddly even though it’s scaled like a full-length mirror. The drive selector is just nasty. Wrong, of course, to expect the car to compete with the range of materials available to Mercedes and Land Rover, but right, I think, to expect better of a car that starts at a similar price to a BMW i5. Certainly there’s too much Mach-E GT inside, provoking a Pavlovian response in yours truly to memory of the flagship model’s ride quality, which was like being pushed down the Exorcist steps in a shopping trolley.
Mercifully, the Rally does not ride like that. Whether it’s the retuned MagneRide suspension or the 20mm of additional height you get between fatter sidewalls and wheel arch isn’t entirely clear. But the end result is: the Rally gets up a road perfectly reasonably, and is accommodating in a way that seems roughly analogous to its RallyCross purpose. This newfound levity not only makes the Mach-E seem more like a conventional SUV in a bump-absorbing sense, it also helps to underwrite another basic truth: unexpectedly, and while itself tipping the scales at the best part of two-and-a-half tonnes, the battery-electric Ford feels like the lightest car of the three.
There’s a good reason for this, it turns out. On paper, the SV is more than 100kg heavier than the EV; the G450d, preposterously, more than 150kg lardier than that. This difference does not necessarily translate into increased entertainment value - even in its rear-biased RallySport mode, the Mach-e is too numb in its steering and compromised under braking for that - but for fleeting moments, it does seem like the most quick-witted option. Predictably enough, this occurs when playing to the strengths of dual electric motors, in breakneck starts or away from tight corners, where the immediacy of 634lb of torque (that amount eclipsing either combustion engine) is readily apparent.
That the intensity of the delivery tapers after a certain point is no more of a surprise than its inherent soullessness, though Ford’s failure (or reluctance, perhaps) to make the Rally drive like an electric Baja racer is closer to the heart of the car’s problem. The special edition, as Matt surmised not so long ago, is fine as far as it goes - which qualifies as a step in the right direction for the Mach-E - but it doesn’t live up to its own rallying cry on the road, nor its cost. All too often it’s the homogenous, fire-and-forget persona of an electric crossover that floats to the surface; theoretically brisk, yet too dynamically undercooked for you to care much.
Getting comfy in the SV’s driver’s seat summons up any number of heavyweight similes: this must be what it’s like to pilot the Spruce Goose or a Panzer VIII Maus or those barges they use to move oil rigs, you tell yourself. It has huge presence, the mass of the thing somehow all around you, even when stationary, its extremities colossally distant. Probably this is amplified by your head being lower to the ground than it is in a full-size Range Rover, in a cabin (and behind a dash) that functions like a parapet. Granted, I had the seat as low as it would go - but you get the picture: it’s easy to feel like a marionette in the SV, working the pedals of some great, glowering machine.
And boy oh boy, does it glower. Its SVR-badged predecessor, powered by the old supercharged V8, had a knack of making its output seem playful, like we all knew it wasn’t a seriously fast car because it never seemed to be taking itself seriously at all. The SV, with its trick 6D chassis and German engine, is as serious as a NASA orbiter mission about going fast, and seems it almost straightaway. For one thing, it easily rivals the Mach-E in accelerative ferocity. The throttle is wonderfully easy to modulate, so you don’t particularly need to explode out the blocks - though you probably will. And when you do, BMW’s hot-vee S68 responds much as it does elsewhere, which is to say fervently.
The same goes for the extravagant quantities of hydraulic fluid being pumped at incredible pressures around the SV’s interconnected dampers. The remarkable thing about the system is that for all its mastery of lateral forces, you rarely give it a second thought. This says much about the skill with which it has been configured, the SV’s resistance to pitch during its headlong assaults at the horizon appearing completely unremarkable. But clearly it’s there, doing its thing; not least in those moments where keeping your foot in would have previously resulted in disarray or else disaster. The SV’s capacity for indulging the full potential of its V8 is what sets it far apart from the SVR.
This, it must be said, requires some space. Both mental and physical. The latter mainly because of the size thing (or at any rate, your perception of it). This is not a car for the spindly local B road with a quaint pub at one end. Ideally you’ll want to be in Wales where the bends are sighted and the surrounding countryside deserted save for four-legged Sunday lunches. If you find yourself there, and in anything like the right mood, the SV, particularly on its summery tyres, will do things that beggar belief. Remarkably, the marshalling of its giant kerbweight and the management of its grip are not extant qualities; they somehow function as part of a cohesive whole, the consistency of the steering and the positivity of the front end encouraging you on and on.
In fact, the SV is so admirably good at going fast that you do start to notice how tetchy it is when you’re not going Mach 2 with your hair on fire. Unaided by its huge wheels, there’s a tendency for the car to thump slow-speed intrusions rather than isolate you from them. A tendency brought into sharp relief by the slower, throatier, comfier G-Class. If the SV is all about confounding your expectations, the G450d is about meeting them head on in a bear hug. Perhaps if the car were still surrounded by a multitude of similarly powerful, big capacity diesel engines, we could step back from its charms and assess its 553lb ft of torque in a wider context - but in 2025, and in Wales, where it equalled the peak twist of the Range Rover Sport, it positively thrummed with outlier charm.
The G450d is a replacement for the old G400d, the uptick in numbers signifying that Mercedes has slipped yet another upgrade in under the wire. True enough, 37hp and the same again in torque doesn’t sound like much, yet it has slashed more than half a second from the 0-62mph time - and the previous version was not what you’d call sluggish. Driven back to back with the Range Rover Sport, it’s not what you’d call prodigiously fast either, though that undersells the satisfaction of engaging with it. In the SV, the V8 feels harnessed to a very clever chassis for your (often puerile) amusement; in the G450d, the diesel engine harmonises with its old-school setting for your pleasure, seeming no more out of place than a roaring fire in a thatched cottage.
As you might expect, it is the sort of relationship that evades the Mach E entirely, and it speaks succinctly to the problem of virtually all electric cars - not least because I can tell you from firsthand experience that the electrified G580 suffers from it too. The engine is not just a means of propulsion in the G-Class, it is a third of the car’s tangible charm, no less fundamental to its appeal than the handling or right-angled styling. You’re reminded, too, of the rightness of compression ignition when it comes to moving something so manifestly heavy. Redundant, you might think, to dwell on mid-range performance when measured against a turbocharged V8 or battery power - but don’t discount how right-sized the industriousness and delivery of a big oil burner continues to seem in the real world.
Especially when you consider that the G450d does not need a Welsh hillside to get the best from it. Unlike the V8-powered G63, the diesel, like the G500, makes do with a passively sprung (though adaptively damped) suspension, that fits it like a chainmail glove. Compared with the SV, it lolls about on the road surface with the impetuosity of a sailing dinghy - though of course it is this same dynamic latitude that makes the G-Class flow so enigmatically at everyday speeds. You bob along with it, happy as a lark. Thanks to its wing-mounted indicators and steep windscreen, it’s the easiest car here to place on the road. Yes, it’s the slowest to turn, and you don’t need to exceed its comfort zone to know just how far short of the SV it falls when pushing on - though by then you’ll be a long way past the speed limit.
If you’re inclined to use that number as a jumping-off point, then clearly, you should buy the SV. We await the result of Aston Martin’s effort to reinvigorate the already monstrously quick DBX, but it is unlikely that it will significantly overshadow Land Rover’s flagship: much like the Cayenne Turbo GT it was designed to stick it to, the SV rewires the whole concept of what we expect an SUV to be and do. It says much about the flagship’s potency that it relegates Ford’s high-powered EV to distant also-ran; unfair, perhaps, to call the Rally a one-trick pony, but the SV is quicker virtually everywhere, nullifying the standout reason for choosing a Mach-E in the first place. Granted, there are broader motivations for considering an electric SUV, but reduced running costs hardly seem pertinent here. The massive drag factor of personality-free battery power certainly is.
Possibly it is the EV’s failure to spark the imagination that makes the G450d, by some margin the heaviest and slowest car here, seem so irresistible. You arrive at the driver’s door expecting it to be burly and blustery and idiosyncratic, and it is all of those things - but it is also pleasant and personable in a way that too often escapes the task-focused Range Rover Sport, even when the latter is being more refined and in supremely better control of its faculties. The G-Class simply cannot get to some of the places the SV will take you, and nor does it rival the sound or sensation of the V8 that gets you there. But if you really want an SUV that encapsulates all the contradictions and 4x4 charm of a powered-up segment that makes precious little sense coming in, we’d cautiously recommend you buy a diesel one that looks a lot like a military vehicle from 50 years ago. Classic PH.
SPECIFICATION | 2025 FORD MUSTANG MACH-E GT RALLY
Engine: Twin AC synchronous electric motors, 99kWh (91kWh usable) Li-ion battery
Transmission: 1-speed auto, four-wheel drive
Power (hp): 487
Torque (lb ft): 634
0-62mph: 3.6 seconds
Top speed: 124mph
Combined range: 316 miles (WLTP)
Energy consumption: 2.9 mi/kWh
CO2: 0g/km (WLTP)
Kerbweight: 2,343kg (DIN)
Price: £69,300 (price as tested £70,950)
SPECIFICATION | 2025 RANGE ROVER SPORT SV EDITION TWO
Engine: 4,395cc twin-turbocharged V8
Transmission: 8-speed automatic, four-wheel drive
Power (hp): 635@6,000-7,000rpm
Torque (lb ft): 553@1,800-5,855rpm
0-62mph: 3.8 seconds
Top speed: 180mph
Weight: 2,560kg (EU)
MPG: 23.5
CO2: 272g/km
Price: £174,545 (price as tested £187,100)
SPECIFICATION | 2025 MERCEDES-BENZ G-CLASS G450D
Engine: 2989cc, six-cylinder, turbo, diesel
Transmission: 9-speed automatic, all-wheel drive
Power (hp): 367@4,000rpm
Torque (lb ft): 553@1,350-2,800rpm
0-62mph: 5.8 secs
Top speed: 130mph
Weight: 2,727kg (EU)
MPG: 31.4
CO2: 235g/km
Price: £141,065 (price as tested £156,555)
- 2024 Range Rover Sport SV | UK Review
- 2025 Ford Mustang Mach-E Rally | UK Review
- 2021 Mercedes G400d | PH Review
The G-Wagon is a timeless design to me, like a Beetle or a Mini. I’d love to give one a go, they always turn my head when one rumbles past. I always try to spy the side exhausts to see if it’s a G63.
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