Land Rover 2005: Standing out

The heavily wooded areas surrounding the quaint Canadian town of Montebello in Quebec are filled with wildlife. There are cougars, elk and mountain goats and, deep within the tapestry of the nearby Kenauk Reserve, there is the hum of a fleet of Land Rover sport-utility vehicles.

Nowadays, you are most likely to spot the newest of three Land Rovers sold in North America. It is the 2005, mid-size Land Rover LR3, currently undergoing final testing, mostly rigorous off-road driving, at the Land Rover Experience Driving School at Kenauk.

It is a tough off-road course. There are many rocks, lots of deep mud and seriously rutted ruts. There are fallen logs of various dimensions; and there is a man-made log bridge, a scary thing consisting of three huge logs on the bridge's right and left, the whole thing supported by huge cross members atop poles sunk into a ravine.

I feared crossing that one, especially inasmuch as there was a gap about two feet wide running down the bridge's middle. But I slipped LR3's gearbox into first and low, prayed and drove across without incident.

There is a tendency after such triumphs to fall in love with the thing that facilitated victory. I did. But it was affection beyond infatuation, which is significant about the LR3.

The LR3's wheelbase is 14 inches longer than that of the Discovery. That helps to give it a better on-road ride. It is laden with technology, all of it purposeful and useful.

But two technical attributes of the LR3 stand out among the rest. They are the new SUV's Integrated Body-Frame (IBF) structure and its wonderfully effective Terrain Response system. There lately has been a trend of building SUVs in the manner of cars and minivans.

Car companies have been using a unibody structure ­ that is, an all-in-one frame to which various chassis and other components are attached. The benefits of unibody construction include a lighter-weight body, one that rides and handles more like a car and that causes less damage to smaller cars in crashes.

But many off-roaders have remained unimpressed with unibody performance in the rough, which is why certain car manufacturers have gone back to traditional body-on-frame SUV construction.

The LR3 offers a compromise ­ two high-strength frame rails mated to a rigid body structure. The result is a vehicle body that better manages crash energy and improves on-road driving without undermining off-road performance.