For enhanced safety, the front and second-row seat shoulder belts of the Land Rover Range Rover have pretensioners to tighten the seatbelts and eliminate dangerous slack in the event of a collision. The GMC Yukon XL doesn’t offer pretensioners for its second-row seat belts.
The Range Rover’s pre-crash front seatbelts will tighten automatically in the event the vehicle detects an impending crash, improving protection against injury significantly. The Yukon XL doesn’t offer pre-crash pretensioners.
Both the Range Rover and Yukon XL have child safety locks to prevent children from opening the rear doors. The Range Rover has power child safety locks, allowing the driver to activate and deactivate them from the driver's seat and to know when they're engaged. The Yukon XL’s child locks have to be individually engaged at each rear door with a manual switch. The driver can’t know the status of the locks without opening the doors and checking them.
To provide maximum traction and stability on all roads, All-Wheel Drive is standard on the Range Rover. But it costs extra on the Yukon XL.
The Range Rover has a standard blind spot warning system that uses sensors to alert the driver to objects in the vehicle’s blind spots where the side view mirrors don’t reveal them and moves the vehicle back into its lane. A system to reveal vehicles in the Yukon XL’s blind spot costs extra.
To help make backing out of a parking space safer, the Range Rover has standard Rear Traffic Monitor and Rear Traffic Braking automatically engages the brakes to help avoid a collision. GMC charges extra for Rear Cross Traffic Alert on the Yukon XL and the Yukon XL’s Rear Cross Traffic Alert does not include automatic braking.
The Range Rover’s driver alert monitor detects an inattentive driver then sounds a warning and suggests a break. According to the NHTSA, drivers who fall asleep cause about 100,000 crashes and 1500 deaths a year. The Yukon XL doesn’t offer a driver alert monitor.
For better protection of the passenger compartment, the Range Rover uses safety cell construction with a three-dimensional high-strength frame that surrounds the passenger compartment. It provides extra impact protection and a sturdy mounting location for door hardware and side impact beams. The Yukon XL uses a body-on-frame design, which has no frame members above the floor of the vehicle.
Both the Range Rover and the Yukon XL have standard driver and passenger frontal airbags, front side-impact airbags, side-impact head airbags, four-wheel antilock brakes, traction control, electronic stability systems to prevent skidding, crash mitigating brakes, daytime running lights, lane departure warning systems and rearview cameras.