Not about Series vehicles, but some of you might be interested.... While in
the UK the last couple of weeks, we had the use of a Series II Commercial
Discovery with the TD5 engine. For those of you who don't know, a
Commercial Discovery is "made" by the Special Vehicles division at Land
Rover. The interior consists of the driver's compartment and a
flat-floored, empty shell behind it with a cargo bulkhead running from
floor to roof behind the front seats. They used to use the two-door
Discovery for this, with body-colored metal panels in place of the side
windows. However, Land Rover no longer makes the two-door body for the
Discovery, so the Commercial version today has all four doors, but the side
windows aft of the front doors are solid panels that look like smoked glass
(but you can't see through them). The rear door windows do not open. The
one we had was the very first Series II Commercial Discovery off the line.
While the vehicle was fine and suited our purposes perfectly on the narrow,
walled roads in the Yorkshire Dales, I was not overly impressed with the
TD5 engine. It certainly moved the vehicle along smartly on the motorways,
and cruising at 70-plus did not seem to tax the engine as much as it did
the older Tdi-powered Land Rovers I've driven. But the TD5 has a most
annoying habit of jerking and hunting at slower speeds when you let off on
the throttle. When driving the winding, hilly roads in the Dales, often
in third gear, the engine would stumble and hunt when the throttle was
"neutralized," in other words when you weren't making the engine work but
you weren't decelerating either.
This trait was particularly bad when the engine was cold, but even after
being thoroughly warmed up it would still hunt and buck sometimes during
the transition between making power and deceleration. I perhaps
incorrectly recall someone on this list saying that the TD5 has an
electronic throttle linkage, so perhaps that's the problem. Maybe the
sensors get confused in the transition between acceleration and
deceleration. Or maybe it was just our engine, although the vehicle was
only a year old. But if this is a characteristic of the TD5, I can see why
the engine hasn't generated particularly positive reputation.
While I have known about the BBC program "Top Gear" for a long time, I've
never actually watched it until this trip. From an American's point of
view, it was refreshing to see a motor review program that said a vehicle
was total rubbish when it was, rather than bend over backwards to find
something nice to say about it even though the vehicle in fact is total
crap. I guess since the BBC does not depend on commercial sponsors to pay
the bills, it's much easier for them to put on a show that expresses
unpopular opinions. But I've always found it annoying that the American
motoring press, even back when I first started reading Road & Track in the
1960s, NEVER says a manufacturers' vehicle is junk, even when everyone
knows it is. They always tiptoe around the bad stuff and make a big deal
out of the good stuff, even if the only good thing about the car is the
design of the door handle. God forbid you tick off the sponsor, who is
likely to be the manufacturer of the car you're reviewing.
It's always fun to take a trip to Europe or the UK because there are so
many vehicles you just never see in the US. The trend these days seems to
be toward really odd designs, some of them nice, some of them really
hideous. There is a Fiat mini-van/SUV/station wagon thing, for instance,
that to my mind is absolutely attrocious from every single angle.
I also caught the tail end of another motoring program in the UK which was
a sort of "shoot off" between the new Range Rover, the Toyota Land Cruiser,
and the BMW X-5. The X-5 had the best car-like handling, I believe it was
very close between the Range Rover and Land Cruiser for off-road
capabilities, but the Range Rover won overall. The Land Cruiser was summed
up as an out-dated, overly-heavy design.
I did not have a chance to drive a new Range Rover on this trip, but the
friend we visited the last couple of days has one in his fleet and has been
driving it recently. His is the diesel version, but he said it drives like
no other Range Rover before it. The monocoque-type construction gives it
superb handling characteristics, apparently. However, he has not had any
experience with it under off-road conditions, so he couldn't say how the
vehicle stacks up against the older ones in that respect. His opinion is
that the original "classic" chassis is probably better suited for off-road
work than either the "new model" Range Rover (1995-2001) or the current
model. I've never cared for the looks of the "new model" Range Rover, as
to me it looks like a Ford Explorer, but I must admit I really like the
styling of the "brand new" version. Don't like the price, though,
although they are actually less expensive in the US than in the UK due to
taxes and other factors.
Finally, if the Defender and Discovery have anything like the longevity of
the Series Land Rovers, there will never be a shortage of them for the next
100 years. They are literally everywhere, particularly the Discovery.
Oddly enough, I did not see as many Freelanders as I expected to, even
though this vehicle has been touted as the most popular SUV in Europe. But
in the Dales and the greater Manchester area, Discoveries in particular are
virtually everywhere. Of all the newer Land Rover vehicles I saw on the
trip, the one I would most like to have was the most popular version in the
Dales- a D90 pickup with these really nice aluminum canopies over the bed
with external bracing ribs on the canopy. Very handy looking vehicle,
that. The same style canopy is used on D110 pickups, too.
________________________
C. Marin Faure
(original owner)
1973 Land Rover Series III-88
1991 Range Rover Vogue SE
Seattle, WA
marin.faure@boeing.com
faurecm@earthlink.net
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