Land rover

My toxic affair with my Land Rover

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

Can the Ineos Grenadier rival the Land Rover?

When Land Rover finally axed its ‘old’ Defender in 2016 and promised to replace it with something better, traditionalists shed tears as readily as their beloved old-school Landys dripped oil. And the arrival of the ‘new’ Defender in early 2020 did nothing to help: ‘too expensive’, said some; ‘too complicated’, said others. ‘Too precious’, they moaned. ‘Not a real Defender’, they concluded. Oddly, it seemed, such people really did want to carry on driving a car based on a 70-year-old design that was bereft of safety features, as aerodynamic as a breeze block, as draughty as a shed, rusted readily underneath and with the turning circle of a tanker. But

The curious appeal of old Land Rovers

When the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arrived at Holyrood House to watch a drive-in screening of the Disney film Cruella with NHS staff last month, the Daily Telegraph reported that the couple ‘paid tribute to the late Duke of Edinburgh’ by travelling in one of his ‘beloved’ Land Rovers – which, as any Landy fan will tell you, was a long wheelbase station wagon in Bronze Green with glass ‘alpine lights’ in the roof and, unusually, a colour-co-ordinated hard top and bumper. Judging by the royal couple’s un-dishevelled appearance – he in a dark two-piece, white shirt, no tie; she in a belted, ankle-length coat of muted blue tartan

Our theatres are dark – and in danger

Car showrooms are open again: some dealerships, with a hint of forgivable hyperbole, report a surge of pent-up demand. And after building only 197 new cars this April, compared with 71,000 in April 2019, car factories are returning to production — even if under new safety rules that will slash productivity for the duration and accelerate the shift to job-eliminating robotics for the longer term. But still the Daily Telegraph offers an uplifting glimpse of Land Rover’s Solihull plant emerging from hibernation: ‘At 5 a.m., as the first shift came in, every production manager was out in the car park to greet returning staff.’ Perhaps most importantly, Nissan made two