Range Rover rental
Kuala Lumpur

The Range Rover invented the luxury SUV in 1970 and every rival in the category is, in some sense, a response to it. The founding idea was radical at the time: take proper off-road capability — permanent four-wheel drive, long-travel coil suspension, a separate chassis — and wrap it in something a family would be happy to arrive at a hotel in. Nobody had combined those things before and the formula has proven almost impossible to improve on.

The modern engineering that matters to a renter is the air suspension. The Vogue and the Velar both use height-adjustable air springs with multiple ride settings, which does two things nothing else in the fleet manages. It gives you a genuinely magic-carpet ride over the trenched, patched and rutted surfaces that make up half the roads in the Klang Valley, and it lets you raise the car to clear a flooded underpass after a downpour without a second thought. In Malaysian conditions during the monsoon that second capability is not theoretical.

The Sport SVR is the anomaly and the enthusiast's pick. Its supercharged V8 is one of the last of its kind — supercharged, not turbocharged, which means no lag and a hard-edged supercharger whine layered over a proper V8 rumble — and the chassis has been reworked with stiffer anti-roll control and a faster steering rack. It is a 2.3-tonne SUV that does not make sense on any spreadsheet and is enormously entertaining on the Karak.

Practically, the whole range solves problems the low cars create. Every basement ramp and every square-shouldered Bangsar speed hump is a non-event. Four adults and their luggage fit properly. Visibility is commanding in heavy traffic. If you want something fast and you also want to not think about the road surface for a week, this is the section of the fleet to look at.