The Land Rover Discovery Sport is officially hitting the end of its production run this year.
If you look across Land Rover’s full SUV lineup, you’ll see three main lines: Range Rover, Defender and Discovery. The latter has included the brand’s smallest SUV for the past decade, the Discovery Sport, though I’m willing to best most of you out there forgot about that one. Nevertheless, the mini Disco has persevered…until now. As originally reported by Autocar over in the UK, Land Rover confirmed it will officially end production later this year.
“Discovery Sport production will end in December 2026,” a JLR spokesperson said, “in line with normal product lifecycles. As part of this transition there will be a managed sunset of manufacturing ahead of this date for certain markets.”
While the Discovery Sport has been the brand’s slowest-selling model in recent years — seriously, when’s the last time you remembered it existed? — that is not the headlining reason JLR is killing the model off. Instead, it appears the aging SUV is coming face-to-face with tougher safety regulations: namely, the EU’s latest General Safety Regulation 2 (GSR2) rules. The automaker updated its other models like the Range Rover and Defender to comply, though it is ostensibly tougher to make a case for doing so on a small vehicle with equally small profit margins.
With the smaller Disco’s departure, the Range Rover Evoque will now serve as JLR’s entry-level SUV. While its sibling is rolling into the history books in about four months, representatives for the Range Rover line said there are no current plans to stop the Evoque. The baby Range Rover is also getting a little long in the tooth, but JLR is currently focusing on its more profitable flagships, including the Range Rover GT and the fully electric versions of the full-fat Range Rover and the Range Rover Sport.
We have touched on the full-size Discovery far more recently than the Sport (and the big one is sticking around for the time being), but we haven’t seen the smaller version in years since its initial 2015 launch.
