Aging Land Rover Discovery Sport to be discontinued by 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 debuted 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 crossover Range Rover Evoque, which is currently in its second generation (in production since 2018).

According to British magazine Autocar, production of the Discovery Sport will end later this year, as the outdated model does not comply with the European Union’s new GSR2 safety regulations, the final phase of which came into force on July 7 this year. In theory, JLR could adapt the Discovery Sport to meet GSR2, but that would drive up the cost of an aging crossover for which demand is already low.

In the first half of this year, according to the company’s own data, the Discovery Sport sold 5,316 units worldwide, down 32.1% compared to January-June 2025. The Discovery Sport is currently Land Rover’s least sought-after model. For 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, its market potential is not yet exhausted, so the Evoque was adapted to GSR2 rules, while the Discovery Sport was not.

At the beginning of this decade, JLR planned to release a new generation Discovery Sport on the EMA (Electrified Modular Architecture) platform, meaning the “second” Discovery Sport was supposed to be an electric vehicle, but then, amid the global slowdown in EV demand and the deterioration of JLR’s financial health, this project was shelved indefinitely. In other words, a new Discovery Sport should not be expected in the coming years, and the company’s first new model on the EMA platform will be the Range Rover GT cross-liftback, which will hit the market in 2027 and will effectively replace the outgoing Discovery Sport on the JLR plant’s assembly line in Halewood.

The upcoming discontinuation of the Discovery Sport once again raises the question of the future of the Discovery brand, which in 2027 will be left with a single flagship model — the Discovery SUV of the fifth generation by official chronology. The Discovery sells only slightly better than the Discovery Sport: in the first half of this year, only 5,736 units were sold (-24%). Two years ago, it was suggested that the “sixth” Discovery would resemble a minivan, but nothing has been heard about that project since. Meanwhile, the Freelander brand, launching in China this year, targets exactly the same audience as Discovery — family buyers who love to travel. How JLR intends to differentiate Freelander and Discovery in the market remains unclear.