I've always liked Range Rovers, since they first came out in the 1970s. It never occurred to me that I might actually want one though... But in
mid 2015, I saw this 8-year-old one and decided to give it a try, as a "second car" beside the Lexus.
It was brilliant. I used it everywhere, and hardly used the Lexus, which I ended up selling.
About 2 weeks after I got it, I went to the Open Golf at St Andrews - you had to "park and ride" in a field and get a bus into the town. The field was on a steep slope, it bucketed rain all day, and by the time I got back to the car, people leaving earlier had churned the field into a muddy quagmire that you could hardly walk on, never mind drive. The organisers had laid down metal sheets around 3 sides of the slope to get up to the gate, but even that was coated in rain and mud, so folk were a-slippin' and a'slidin' all over the place, in every direction but except out towards the gate.
After glissading down this slope to the car, I decided to be a smart-arse (or a complete arsehole, no middle ground here!) and see what a Range Rover could do - engage "mud and snow" setting, locked diffs, low ratio gears - and it went straight up the steep bit without the slightest hesitation - a wee wave to the policeman directing traffic at the gate, a brief stop to reset "road" settings, and it's off for home!
A wee while after that, my son bought me an off-road driving experience as a present - that's where the photo was taken. I was amazed at where the car could go, and extract itself from again.
A couple of weeks after that, I washed it and stuck on some white ribbon, and drove a friend to her wedding in it.
Not long after that, my son was giving away an old 3-piece suite, and was going to hire a van to transport it. We managed to squeeze 2 chairs in as one load, and then the sofa on a second run. Fitting them in was like an episode of the Krypton Factor with two particularly dim contestants - they only just fitted, to be fair, and the tailgate was maybe not quite closed, but we were only going a couple of miles each time, and it did the job!
Land Rover used to advertise the Range Rover as "A car for all reasons" and it really is! If you want to get a bride on a sofa up a slippery mountain, this is the car for you!
This one had 90,000 miles on it when I bought it, and I used it solidly for 4 years.
Like TVRs, the Range Rovers have a reputation for unreliability. Maybe it's to do with expectations, but mine didn't have any real problems.
The main problem arose after after a few years when it started leaving black smoke when you accelerated. The wee independent garage diagnosed that it had a cracked inlet manifold - they are only plastic and are liable to cracking. They carried out a patch repair (replacing the manifold involves an expensive new manifold and an excessive amount of labour) and that sorted it for a while, then it happened again.
This time, I decided to try to repair it myself. After removing the air cleaners and the air hoses to the turbos, you could see enough of this manifold to see where another crack had appeared. I used an old soldering irron to "plastic weld" the crack, with a bit of black cable tie as the weld filler. It worked!
I ended up selling it after 4 years, with about 160,000 miles on it, to buy a 6-month-old Mercedes C-class. That lasted less than a year before I was back in a Range Rover. They are superb!