I got my first Land Rover at the age of 45 – it’s just as marvellous as I hoped
I remember how much I loved piling Barbie and Ken into their perfect red Range Rover, putting the plastic dog in the boot and then standing back to admire the symmetry and style of the car. It was actually a 1980s Sindy model which had been handed down to us by a friend, but Barbie and Ken just about fitted into it. Something about its square shape, black bumpers and smooth beige seats really appealed to me. I loved the clunky sound it made when I closed the boot and its chunky wheels. Even though I was only six, I knew then that it was everything I ever wanted in a car.
Almost 40 years later, I finally got my wish in the form of our Land Rover Discovery. It looks quite similar to a Range Rover Evoque but is, thankfully, much less flashy. And hopefully a bit less likely to be nicked, given that Land Rovers are among the most stolen cars and insurance premiums for some models are becoming unaffordable.
I know little about cars and realise this might make me sound like a hideous midlife cliché, but owning a Land Rover really is just as good as I had hoped. Ownership is, as one friend put it, a long-term love affair. My car is not new, it’s a 2015 basic model with a 2.2-litre old Ford engine, but it works perfectly for our family of five.
It’s nothing particularly fancy – a Discovery Sport model, so quite compact compared with range-topping Range Rovers but it is just big enough to fit in three children comfortably, plus a friend or two, and our beloved dog, Luna the Labrador. Best of all, it has two rows of seats at the back to minimise sibling fights.
The fact it has seven seats was pretty much the deal-clincher when we bought it last year. It was either that or one of those van-like people carriers which would make me feel a bit like a taxi driver. We had a family holiday to Ireland last summer and, having left the dog for a whole week when we went to Greece in the previous year, we wanted to take her with us this time. With our new Discovery, we could fit the dog crate in the back and pull down one of the back seats for our youngest, so everyone could fit in. Admittedly, we did have to buy one of those roofbox things for our luggage, but you can’t have everything, can you?
I’m still haunted by a road trip to south-west France we did when the children were very little and all trapped in the back of our old Mazda CX-5. The arguments, lack of space and fact my husband seemed to think he was competing in his own one-man Grand Prix around Bordeaux made it an insufferable, divorce-worthy experience. We vowed never to do it again.
I think my latent, long-standing love of Land Rovers was a significant contributing factor, too. There’s just something so regal about them. They were practically de rigueur when I was growing up and doing Pony Club in Warwickshire, home to Jaguar Land Rover, along with a battered old Ifor Williams trailer. We were nowhere near as wealthy as some of my Land Rover-owning peers, who sometimes used to let me climb in and watch the showjumping from the lofty heights of their car. They always had the tags from whichever event they had last been to hanging from the rear view mirror – Blenheim, Badminton or Gatcombe. Climbing up to the throne of their Landy made me feel as though I belonged. We mostly just had company cars and used my dad’s Volvo to tow the horsebox. I have fond memories of sitting in the rear seats facing the back window and waving and pulling faces at the people in the cars behind.
A few years later, in the early 1990s, my mum inherited an old ex-Army Land Rover, which had moss growing inside the windows. We rattled around in that for a few years and it was great for shuttling friends back and forth for sleepovers, even though the noise was so loud we couldn’t really hold a conversation in the back. It was still better than the Suzuki she had before, however, which once got stuck up a very steep hill with a trailer and two ponies in the back. The only way we could get it up the hill was to take the ponies out and lead them up by hand.
Then my dad went on to buy a Land Rover when I was in my 20s and ever since then, I have loved riding, pillion style, next to him while we head to watch a riding event or drive through bumpy country lanes. He’s had his current one for almost 20 years and it has almost 250,000 miles on the clock.
My technical knowledge of cars is ignorant at best but I know what I like and I don’t care if Land Rovers are a ubiquitous upwardly mobile cliché here in the Cotswolds. I still wanted one.
We have only had ours for just over six months and it’s already proved invaluable. It comes into its own in the winter or during our last trip to Devon, hurtling around the windy, coastal roads. There’s something about being a bit more high up, feeling safe and having that four-wheel drive option should the going get really challenging.
We have previously owned old Volvo estates, Mazdas and a Volkswagen, all of which were absolutely fine – but they don’t compare with the Land Rover.
Perhaps we should probably have gone for the more environmentally friendly alternative of an electric car but my sister has one of those and any time we go anywhere more than about 20 miles away she starts panicking about where we can charge it. The purchase price was also an issue. Even a fairly standard seven-seater hybrid SUV, such as the family-friendly Kia Sorento, would set us back in excess of £41,000 whereas we paid £17,000 for our Discovery.
I know SUVs aren’t popular for a number of reasons – I place the huge, so-called Chelsea Tractors in a whole different category – but our car genuinely meets our needs as a family of five living in a relatively rural area.
Admittedly, it would be nice if we didn’t have to pay quite so much for insurance. It has gone up from £390 last year to about £660 this year, not helped by me getting three points on my licence while belting out a few Taylor Swift tunes with my daughter on one of the many 50mph zones on the M40. A friend, who owns a similar Discovery model made in 2016, and lives in a town, has seen her insurance premium increase from £325 to £775 a month.
But that’s nothing compared with Range Rovers, which, according to Money Supermarket, cost between £776 to insure an Evoque up to a staggering £2,714 a year for a Range Rover Sport SVR. No wonder people are so keen to steal them. There is also the fact that people see Range Rovers as “tacky” and probably view Discovery Sports in a similar vein.
Their status symbol credentials made the Range Rover Sport and Range Rover Autobiography the two most stolen cars in 2022 and even led to parent company Jaguar Land Rover launching its own in-house insurance scheme in a bid to help customers overcome soaring premium costs.
Land Rover Insurance launched in October and has so far provided more than 4,000 clients with a JLR insurance solution, with an average monthly premium of less than £200, according to Fleet News.
I know some people view all SUVs as pretentious gas-guzzlers. One friend, who owns a pub in Oxfordshire, says she loved the old Discovery and Defenders but that the more recent models have “ruined” the brand. They are, she says, the price of a small house in the North and this results in a certain type of buyer that would rather run you off the road then move over an inch. It is, she says, like comparing a legend such as singer Grace Jones with Cheryl Cole.
Another neighbour says the only Land Rovers that are acceptable are the older models that looked like they are “nailed together” and that the newer ones look “inauthentic”. I have to agree that owning an SUV when you live in London, or any other city for that matter, seems a bit pointless. It comes into its own here in rural Oxfordshire though.
The mechanic at our local garage also says, gulp, that many of the newer Land Rover models are unreliable. The last time I went to see him, to drop off a bottle of gin over Christmas, he was in the process of removing an engine from a Range Rover Evoque after the owner, an elderly lady, had been told the dealership couldn’t fix it for several months. And let’s not forget that the pinnacle of Land Rover’s line-up, the Range Rover, was rated as one of the most unreliable cars in a 2022 survey by Motor Trader according to the Reliability Index, because of the frequency and cost of repairs. The average repair cost was found to be £1,607.
The fact is, however, I’m not the only one who loves my Landy. Several people I know have names for theirs, Bill and Barry, and another says her children call their old Defender their “adventure car”. There are plenty of owners who, like the late Prince Philip, who was renowned for his love of original Land Rovers, would never drive anything else.
My car represents freedom, stability and my 1980s childhood dream. What more could I possibly want?
