Aging Land Rover Discovery Sport to be discontinued by the end of this year

There will be no direct successor to Land Rover's oldest model in the coming years.

The compact family crossover Land Rover Discovery Sport made its debut in 2014, based on the D8/PTA platform with a transversely mounted internal combustion engine. The Discovery Sport underwent its first facelift in 2019, gained a plug-in hybrid variant in 2020, and received its second and final facelift in 2023. The Discovery Sport is produced at JLR's plant in Halewood (England, Merseyside) alongside the platform-sharing Range Rover Evoque, which is currently in its second generation (in production since 2018).

According to the British magazine Autocar, production of the Discovery Sport will come to an end later this year, as the outdated model does not comply with the EU's new GSR2 safety regulations, the final phase of which came into force on 7 July this year. In theory, JLR could have adapted the Discovery Sport to meet GSR2, but this would have pushed up the cost of an ageing crossover for which demand is already low.

In the first half of this year, according to the company itself, the Discovery Sport sold 5,316 units worldwide, a decrease of 32.1% compared with January–June 2025. The Discovery Sport is now Land Rover's least sought-after model. By way of comparison, the Range Rover Evoque sold 13,993 units in the first half of this year (-29.8%), which is also fairly modest, but the Evoque is more prestigious and younger, and its market potential has not yet been exhausted, so the Evoque has been adapted to meet GSR2 regulations, whereas the Discovery Sport has not.

At the start of this decade, JLR had planned to launch a new generation Discovery Sport on the EMA (Electrified Modular Architecture) platform, meaning the "second" Discovery Sport was intended to be an electric vehicle. However, amid the global slowdown in demand for electric vehicles and the deterioration of JLR's financial health, this project was shelved indefinitely. In other words, a new Discovery Sport is not to be expected in the near future, and the company's first model on the EMA platform will be the Range Rover GT cross-liftback, which will reach the market in 2027 and will effectively replace the outgoing Discovery Sport on the production line at JLR's Halewood plant.

The impending discontinuation of the Discovery Sport once again raises the question of the future of the Discovery brand, which by 2027 will be left with just one flagship model — the Discovery SUV in its fifth generation according to official chronology. The Discovery sells only slightly better than the Discovery Sport: in the first half of this year, just 5,736 units were sold (-24%). Two years ago, it was suggested that the "sixth" Discovery would resemble an MPV, but nothing has been heard of that project since. Meanwhile, the Freelander brand, which is being launched in China this year, is targeting exactly the same audience as Discovery — family buyers who enjoy travelling. It remains unclear how JLR intends to position Freelander and Discovery separately in the market.