Paris 2016: Land Rover Discovery looks forward not back

We’ve just made our first acquaintance with the new Land Rover Discovery, and can confirm, as expected when the car was previewed in concept form in New York in 2014, that the days of its rugged, no-nonsense predecessors are all but gone.

The new car is quite tricky to read – its upper mask is much more sculpted than before, while the lower mask seems to swell significantly lower down, making the car seem quite exaggeratedly wide from front on. In terms of stance at the school run, it bullies its way past the Audi Q7 and Volvo XC90 here.

As you move back, the simple but large bodysides make the Discovery seem very tall and narrow. This only gets more ungainly as you move around the the rear, which balloons out to squeeze seven seats into its just sub-five-metre length.

The new car is quite the departure from what has gone before, but there are some vestigial remainders of Discos past. The stepped roof, sans alpine window, is now just barely visible.

The asymmetric tailgate pressing nods to the window line of the previous car, too, but ends up looking a little odd here.

The interior is unlikely to excite, but it does a pretty good job of blending the appearance of looking high quality – and going some way to justify how expensive the Discovery now is – with lots of practical features. The front seats are pushed quite far apart, helping to magnify the feeling of width from inside the car and allowing for two massive storage areas in the centre console.

The second and third row seats are all electrically operated and buzz into position in a similar fashion to an electric tailgate – just a bit too slowly than if you’d done it by hand. However, we sense it’d be a godsend if you had your arms full of free-range children.

Seats down, the luggage space is vast, too, so while the utilitarian looks of the old car are almost entirely disposed of, the utility of the cabin remains, albeit in far smarter clothes than before.