Rover Group Brand's Products

Overnight,

Land Rover be-

came a luxury

car brand, like

Rolls-Royce.

Land Rovers and

Range Rovers be-

came the preferred means of transport for aristocrats, stockbrokers

and drug dealers alike.

Older Land Rovers – the ones that are actually used offroad by

people who aren’t yuppies – never really die. That has been their

traditional strength; somehow or other, older Land Rovers almost

always limp home. Which, by the way, doesn’t mean that Land

Rovers are, or have ever been, especially reliable. They’re more like

a troubled marriage that is continually patched up just as it ap-

proaches disintegration.

It’s worse on the newer models: virtually all modern Land Rover

models suffer from chronic unreliability combined with high re-

pair costs. The BBC’s TopGear magazine said it all: “If [there was]

a formula that combined price with customer satisfaction, then the

Range Rover would come stone last...It gets a ‘very poor’ rating in

just about every single department of reliability.”

We still love Land Rov-

ers. They have a certain

style and character that

you’ll rarely ﬁnd in a Jap-

anese offroader. They are

also among the world’s

best offroad vehicles,

when working. We just

wish that the Land Rover

people could make them

reliable as well •