A well-known trick to increase the perceived desirability of any secondhand car is to find a grand backdrop for the pictures. For the less ambitious this often means nothing more than picking an angle that hides the fridges semi-sunk in your front lawn, or the multitude of near-identical cars that, by remarkably coincidence, you are also selling privately at the same time. But for those wanting to get properly posh it means owning (or finding) a nice stretch of gravel drive, or even using a lake capable of throwing up some artful reflections.
The seller of this week's Brave Pill has gone beyond all of that, and to the outer extreme which is a tasteful Palladian mansion - in this case Wrest Park in Bedfordshire - to give an air of class to this impressively affordable example of a facelifted L322 Range Rover. For most cars such treatment would seem OTT, but even the most cynical have to admit that a £6,500 Rangie remains fully capable of pulling it off.
The words "cheap" and "Range Rover" are often found in close proximity to more strident phrases, these including "avoid", "bargepole" and - to the accompaniment of galloping coconuts - "Run away! Run away!" Yet as is often the case with the automotively adventurous offerings featured here, it is fair to say that our vendor has negated a considerable amount of risk with an extremely attractive price tag. Yes, the mileage is on the high side, the history only partial and the light trim is struggling to hide the stainage of hard use. But it's a well loaded Vogue SE, the outside has scrubbed up nicely and - to naysay the naysayers - there's an MOT history that's conspicuously short of the sort of scary blood-redness common to leggy Land Rovers. Indeed, beyond a semi-regular appearance by worn suspension pins, it's close to whistle clean.
The third-generation Range Rover, often known by its L322 design code, was a car with several fathers. Having fallen in love with both the Land Rover brand and Englishness in general, a BMW big boss was reportedly shocked when he got to see the second-gen P38a Range Rover up close, immediately ordering its replacement with something grander and better. BMW spent a colossal £1bn developing the L322 around a brief of delivering effortless luxury on road and off. But the German company never enjoyed the fruit of its labours, with Land Rover having been sold to Ford before it went on sale.
Politics aside, the car was excellent. It was a point made very agreeably at the original press launch, by far the grandest I've ever attended. This was based in the Highlands with an itinerary that included flying into RAF Lossiemouth on a private jet so we could start our adventure by driving over a hangar, a route including some of the Scotland's finest roads, a drive across a grouse moor and through a river, followed by a night spent at the properly posh Skibo castle. Land Rover's PR department had opted for a 1:1 ratio between VIPs and journos: I had dinner sitting between CEO Bob Dover and brand ambassador Ranulph Fiennes, who told tales of derring-do and chiseling off frostbitten fingers as we quaffed expensive wine.
It's probably no great surprise that early press coverage was as positive as the bumpy end of an AA battery, but it couldn't hide some fairly substantial holes in the model plan. BMW's departure had left the Range Rover short on powertrain options, with early buyers have a binary choice between the acceptable urge but low-teens thirst of the 4.4-litre petrol V8 or the more economical, but grindingly slow, TD6 that used BMW's 3.0-litre straight six diesel and took 13 seconds to crack 60mph.
Cue more some more substantial spend, by Ford this time. For the parts of the world that preferred spark ignition the Range Rover was given the V8 that Jaguar was already using in both vanilla and supercharged flavours. But for the bits of the map that preferred their filling pumps black and oily, the company faced a quandary: the V6 turbodiesel that Ford had developed with PSA wasn't brawny enough to give the full-sized Range Rover an appropriate level of shove, so the company went to the considerable expensive of spinning a V8 from the same 'Lion' architecture, this initially displacing 3.6 litres and making 268hp and 472lb ft of torque.
The Range Rover had finally got the engine it deserved. Or, more fairly, the one British buyers could both enjoy and afford to run. The TDV8 combined serious muscle with acceptable economy - mid-20s normally, 30+ on a gentle cruise - and was even pretty easy on the ear for a big diesel. Performance was respectably rapid rather than outright fast - although the later 4.4-litre version was punchier - but the TDV8's effortless nature has always been its defining characteristic. It was a car that could go anywhere and do pretty much anything.
For a while, at least. But Range Rovers rarely get to enjoy a quiet middle age and the L322 proved no exception, quickly developing a reputation for a selection of the sort of expensive faults that get mechanics remarking that they all do that, and planning extensions on their houses. Areas frequently requiring remedial £££ include gearboxes - especially the earlier five- and six- speeders - differentials, the height-adjusting air suspension, other bits of suspension, the electrical system and, on some cars, a tendency to leak and/or rust.
Yet not every turn of this roulette wheel ends in expensive failure. Whenever Pill features a Range Rover there will be plentiful exceptions to what many regard as the proven rule, commenters jumping in to say they have owned similar cars that proved to be as reliable as a Wednesday Lexus. And has been pointed out before, the very fact any car has got most of the way to 200,000 miles suggests it has been looked after pretty well.
There will almost certainly be some unexpected spend in the future of whoever buys this one, possibly a fair amount of swearing, but there will also be the warming knowledge of having bought an unarguably proper Range Rover for less than a tenth of what it cost new.
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