For the past decade I’ve been in a toxic relationship. Sure, there were red flags – most of them on the dashboard – but it was love, or at least lust, on my part. My Land Rover seduced me with its size and strength, its rugged interior, how safe it made me feel when I was behind the wheel. I was love-bombed with promises of passing the 300,000-mile mark, manipulated by the ease with which three Isofix booster seats slotted into the back.
Yet my Land Rover has cost me dear, both in terms of friendships – my left-leaning, EV-driving neighbours sneered when we lived in London – and in the money I’ve lavished on it: thousands of pounds a year to keep our relationship on the road. It also drank heavily. After Vladimir Putin went tonto, I’d spend as much at the pumps as on the weekly shop. But I didn’t care; we’d cruise up a one-in-three hill towing a trailer without breaking a sweat. I was a goner.
Recently, however, I’ve been wondering how much more abuse I can take from my Discovery 4. The driver’s wing mirror is held on with duct tape, the first port of call for owners of ageing Land Rovers when the quote to replace a wing mirror is £800 to £1,200, plus VAT. For a couple of years I’ve been playing warning light chicken, as various sensors (coolant, air con, parking) gave up the ghost. ‘It’s a common problem with Discoveries,’ chirps our local mechanic. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ The flashing ‘Suspension failure’ message was harder to ignore, but when the mechanic quoted £600 plus VAT for a new compressor, I decided, again, to turn a blind eye.
Last week, red capital letters flashed up on the dashboard – ‘REDUCED PERFORMANCE’ – and the once-mighty six-cylinder engine refused to push the speedometer over 30 mph. I finally admitted that I had to seek help and drove, very slowly, to the expert, John Kemp Land Rover, on the other side of the county. A quick plug-in to his computer gave the diagnosis: a cracked manifold (air duct). Cost to supply and fit: £1,001.91 – not forgetting the VAT. Pathetically grateful, I reached once again for my credit card, but there was a problem.
‘We haven’t been able to get the parts since the Jaguar Land Rover cyber hack. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do,’ he said, as the queue of fellow distressed Land Rover devotees behind me continued to grow. ‘We’ll put you on the list and call you when we can.’ And so I drove home, hazard lights flashing, £80 – plus VAT! – the lighter for the diagnostic check.
Jaguar Land Rover’s IT systems were hacked in August, forcing the closure of its production lines. It announced this week that it was tentatively restarting production while the government says it will underwrite a £1.5 billion loan to support suppliers, amid concerns some smaller businesses could go bust. Yet parts are only becoming more scarce. John Kemp tells me: ‘In another week, we won’t be able to do any repairs – at all.’
Jaguar Land Rover estimates the shutdown has cost at least £2 billion in lost revenue – which feels like the amount the average Land Rover owner spends on maintenance during their lifetime. Older Land Rovers are more straightforward to fix, but anything from the past 30 years is a snowflake in the body of Jason Momoa.
Online you’ll find multiple Land Rover support forums. My friend Charlotte is a regular on a Discovery Sport thread. ‘The cam chain went yesterday on the A43,’ she messages to say. ‘Four different recovery men said Land Rovers are notorious for it. The app doesn’t even work for them to diagnose a problem because of the hack.’
The only time I’ve felt unfaithful to my Discovery is when I catch sight of my friend Laura’s silver Defender 110 TD5 with its facing bench seats in the back. But she sighs as she shares a long list of micro-aggressions: ‘We were driving back from Cornwall in the dark in torrential rain when the windscreen wipers stopped working… There was another time when I drove for an hour in freezing weather in December in hat, gloves, scarf and coat because the windows got stuck down and wouldn’t go up again.’
Why are women in particular putting up with behaviour from cars that they wouldn’t tolerate in a man? ‘Because it makes me happy when I bounce around in it, it’s pretty and I couldn’t part with it EVER,’ Laura replies. Charlotte admits that after spending six hours on the side of the A43, ‘the love affair is wearing pretty thin’, but adds wistfully: ‘It does tow so well…’
My former beloved is stationary on the drive and my husband mutters darkly about scrapping it and buying a Toyota Land Cruiser. I cover my ears, because I’ve found the part that I need on eBay and a video on YouTube on how to replace it – and I reckon it’s worth trying to fix things just one more time.
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