These days we know her as Madge. She’s married, lives in England, has a few sprogs and writes children’s books. In the Eighties and Nineties, Madonna ruled the airwaves in a clinical fashion, using her cut-throat business acumen to turn her talent into the kind of empire that no modern pop princess could ever live up to.
Madonna capitalised on everything from religion to sex and fashion and made a squillion bucks in the process, so it’s no wonder that Britney Spears and such wish they could emulate the undisputed queen of pop.
Madge’s smash hit Vogue and her legacy came to mind when I was test-driving the Range Rover TDV8 Vogue recently.
Why? Because the V8 Vogue seems to have been created with one idea in mind: dominion over all passenger vehicles, and it enforces this theory in the same clinical fashion that Madonna used to dominate the music world.
While I’ve driven vehicles as big as the Vogue, I’ve never driven something as high off the ground as this SUV. It truly towers over most vehicles, even other SUVs, and while it gives you a bird’s-eye view of the road, it does tend to annoy other road-users at night.
The Vogue obviously has Xenon lights, which means it’s a fair deal brighter than your run-of-the-mill halogens. However, when you factor in the height of the headlamps, you unwittingly light up the interior of the vehicles in front of you and you’re then on the receiving end of entirely uncalled-for rudeness wherever you drive at night.
And when you flash your high beams to show those people in front of you that there’s really nothing you can do about the unbearable brightness of beams, they either adjust their rear-view mirrors or give you a zap sign. I spent a great deal of time trying to distance myself from those in front of me, but to no avail, because no sooner would I slow down to create a bigger gap from the car ahead, then someone else would slip into the gap and be rude to me.
Of course, the upshot is that you benefit from near-perfect visibility at night — quite handy when driving an almost three-ton vehicle.
Trying to slow this V8 down was a bit like an ant trying to stop a herd of antelope from charging across an open plain. And the eerie thing is that the handling was so good that I drove much faster around twisty bits than I normally would in an SUV with such high ground clearance.
Inside, the emphasis is on opulence, with the kind of spacious and luxurious interior fit for royalty. On the subject of royalty, I recently watched The Queen and it’s worth noting that most of the vehicles used by the English blue-bloods were Landies of some description.
While I was initially intimidated by the interior adorned with 500-odd buttons with cryptic little signs on them, I quickly figured out the logic behind the controls and things such as the six-DVD shuttle were as easy-as-pie to operate.
The DVD screens built into the rear of the front passengers’ headrests proved handy when we had to babysit two of my rather rambunctious nieces.
They were glued to The Incredibles and insisted on watching the movie to the end, even though they had seen it many times before. The Harman Kardon surround sound system made them feel like they were in their own private theatre, and I was forced to drive around the block until the movie had finished.
I didn’t put the Vogue through any serious 4×4 testing, but the little off-roading I did gave me the feeling that, while this was an exceedingly comfortable vehicle, it nonetheless possessed the genetic make-up to conquer pretty much any terrain.
However, despite the fact that this is a diesel-powered vehicle, the turbo, the V8-engine and its size make it far from frugal.
And, I almost had a nervous breakdown when I was entering a mall through a normal driveway that suddenly seemed narrower than any other mall entrance I’ve ever driven through. I was pretty sure the vehicle wasn’t going to make it through and inched my way nervously past the boom gate as drivers behind me wondered why the hell I was taking so long.
Well, there had to be some drawbacks, even for something as seemingly flawless as the Range Rover TDV8 Vogue.
Fact file
Model: Range Rover TDV8 Vogue
Price: R998000
Engine: 3,6-litre V8, turbodiesel
Tech: 200kW, 640Nm
Top speed: 200kph, 0-100kph in 9,2s
Tank: 105 litres
Services: 20000km