Land Rover Monthly November 2017

“Land Rovers can cost anything from about £500 to way over £100k”  In the past five years I’ve purchased several Land Rovers. For our epic Grand Rover tour from Anglesey to Solihull I bought a diesel Freelander 1 for £950 and then sold it for the same amount a few weeks later. Four years ago I purchased a 200Tdi Defender 110 for £2500 and sold it less than a year later for £5500. Even back then the writing was on the wall. Defender prices were only going to go one way. Towards the end of last year I purchased a 1998 Defender abroad for £6000. Once you add shipping and import duties (roughly around £3500) then I have spent just under £10,000 to buy my dream Defender. Steve Miller, our…

“The pinnacle of the Discovery family has received a number of suspension mods” BY THE time you read this the Discovery SVX will have been revealed for the first time. So, what is it? Hailed by the carmaker as the ultimate all-terrain Discovery, it sits alongside the SVR and SVAutobiography lines and adds a new arm to the Special Vehicle Operations (SVO). Offered exclusively with JLR’s 5.0-litre supercharged V8, tuned to deliver 525 bhp and 625 Nm of torque, the pinnacle of the Discovery family has also received a number of suspension modifications. A model-first for Discovery on SVX is Hydraulic Active Roll Control (H-ARC) system, which gives increased wheel articulation and improved body control, to enhance traction and reduce body roll. It also features increased approach and departure angles,…

YOU ARE HIRED ! After JLR’s global recruitment campaign to hire electronic and software engineers by setting a code-breaking challenge within the Gorillaz app, the first successful code-breaker has been hired. Daniel Dunkley from Gloucestershire, who left school at 16 and was working as a controls engineer at a local quarry, was thrilled to have got the job, as was his father, who owns a Land Rover Defender. CHARITY DRIVE Four friends have agreed to tackle a 2708-mile drive in a 1998 £500 Freelander. The Land Rover enthusiasts reckon it will take them four days to tour around the coast of Britain and are hoping to raise lots of money in process. If you would like to sponsor the Coastbusters Challenge (see what they’ve done there?) you can do so…

DEFENDER SPECIALIST Twisted Automotive has agreed a three-year deal to become a major partner of Gumball 3000. Known for attracting some of the world’s finest supercars and celebs, it’s probably a world away from most of us humble Land Rover owners. Interestingly though, Gumball 3000 founder Maximillion Cooper entered his Twisted 110 in the 2017 edition of the rally, which started in Riga, Latvia, and finished in Mykonos, Greece, and was apparently a real crowd favourite – who needs supercars when you have Defenders?…

WITH AROUND 50 per cent of Land Rover customers owning a dog, the brand decided to put its canine capability to the test by transporting a team of sled dogs to the Vesileppis Ski Tunnel in Finland for a unique training challenge. Setting off in opposite directions, Finnish middle distance champion, Laura Kääriäinen and her team of six sled dogs, went head-to-head with the new Discovery Sport in a 1 km sprint around the tunnel. Watch the race here youtu.be/ AUz01Cgr-ac and see how it fared.…

A 1957 Series I Land Rover has been specially converted to run on railway lines. In the true Go Anywhere spirit of Land Rover, owner Mark Saville has made a set of custom-made train wheels, which enables his road-going 88in to travel on railway tracks in just an hour. You may have already seen Mark at various infamous tracks around the UK, his most recent expedition at Severn Valley. He is now aiming to drive his SI, which he nicknamed Plimsoll across the Forth Rail Bridge. Search for ‘Plimsoll Severn Valley Railway’ in YouTube to see it in action.…