30 years of Discovery
Die Hard was released. The Berlin Wall came down. And the first Discovery – the car Land Rover really didn’t want you to buy – emerged from the West Midlands
Basic, bodged together… brilliant?
Time has not yet been kind to the original Land Rover Discovery. For years you could buy the earliest examples of Land Rover’s other models – Series 1s and three-door Range Rovers – for a few hundred quid. But recently they’ve become the Instagram-friendly classic wheels of choice for the new breed of hipster car enthusiast. They’re both rugged and retro, and thus the perfect match for hipster beards and boots. Values have spiralled, not helped by the fact that for a while Land Rover itself was buying up the good ones and doing factory restorations costing well into six figures for the Range Rovers.
The Discovery has yet to be rediscovered, and that seems unfair. It is 30 years since the original went on sale in the UK, and it quickly became the Ford Mondeo of the British upper-middle classes. Few of us really needed the original Defender, and while most of us want a Range Rover, relatively few of us can afford a new one. The Discovery might not have the macho appeal of one or the glamour of the other, but back then it was the Land Rover that made the most sense for most people. It reached its first million sales in just 23 years – five fewer than the original ‘series’ Land Rovers – and its popularity kept factories open and people employed in the West Midlands as its maker was being passed like an old fiver from Rover to BMW to Ford to Tata.
It’s a historically important car, and the earliest examples are late Thatcher-era period pieces: quirky and revealing and maddening and brilliant to drive. Together, those qualities ought to make the Discovery a collectible, valuable classic. So for its big birthday I thought I’d take an early one up to Scotland to tell its story, and see if I can spark that rediscovery. Maybe I should have bought one first.
The early days of Disco show the British car industry of the time at its best and very worst. By the mid-’80s the Range Rover was proving an unexpected luxury hit, and was pushing upmarket with the introduction of the four-door body, an auto ’box, the Vogue trim and the start of sales in the US. At the same time the Isuzu
Trooper and Mitsubishi Shogun were proving popular at a lower price. Land Rover needed something to take them on, and to plug the widening gap between the Defender (as it would later become) and the Range Rover. Project Jay began in ’86, was approved for production in August ’87 and the Discovery went on sale on time in the UK on 16 November 1989 at £15,750.
That’s really fast, and very disciplined for an entirely new model with strikingly different styling. But Rover did it with a blatant supermarket-sweep of its parts department. The new car used the Range Rover’s 100-inch chassis, its doors and its glass. The front lamps were taken from a Sherpa and the rears from the Maestro van. It was launched – weirdly – as a three-door seven-seater with pressed steel wheels to differentiate it from the Range Rover, in the hope that it wouldn’t cannibalise the more expensive car’s sales. Imagine a manufacturer now making an important new car as unappealing as possible. Buyers had to wait until the following year for the five-door body, alloy wheels, and fuel injection for the V8. Depending on who you believe, the side graphics were there either because you’d never see such a thing on a Range Rover, or to distract from the terrible panel fit.
Our pristine white three-door Disco’s oddball looks are explained by this conflicted genesis, and in turn perhaps explain why they’re not yet being hoovered up by hipsters. Spen King, father of the Range Rover, said he spent ‘less than a fraction of one per cent’ of his time on the exterior design of that car, but real effort went into the first Discovery, with multiple full-size design studies being built. The final design should probably be considered ⊲
It’s a historically important car, and the earliest examples are late Thatcher-era period pieces
a success, given that its ‘Alpine’ skylights, stepped roof and asymmetric rear have either been carried through to – or are hinted at – on the fifth-generation car.
But still, the car I have here on the Blair Atholl estate just looks a bit awkward. Its commercial appearance is easily explained by its van lamps, steel wheels, short doors and long, bulbous aft. Following the old Disco off-road, its voluminous body threatens to topple over its 16-inch, 205section tyres and you could mistake the whole rear end for a Maestro van, and not just the lamps. (Early Freelander mules were disguised as Maestro vans, but just looked like shrunken Discoveries.) Maybe, like the Range Rover, the Disco just needs a bit more time to become cool. Maybe the Instagram influencers of Hoxton are already buying them up. But to me, while being pleasingly of its period, it still doesn’t look good.
And wow, body engineering has moved on in 30 years. Run your hand around the inside of the wheelarch and you’ll feel the sharp edge of the sheet metal, simply folded back on itself. The rain-gutter above the side glass sits proud of the body like the guttering on your house. The window frame on the door is about the simplest piece of metalwork I’ve seen on a car: just a few lengths of straight steel profile welded together, around which you can easily close your fist.
And our expectations of the visual refinement of a pricey SUV have moved on too. The mechanism that folds the front seats forward looks like what it is: the oily, ugly, functional product of a swarfy West Midlands machine shop. There’s no attempt to conceal it. The tiny wing mirrors have two ugly parts codes moulded into them, right in the driver’s line of sight. And much of the switchgear would have been familiar to owners of other contemporary products of British Leyland and its aftermath.
The ashtrays in the door tell almost the entire story of the car. They rotate outwards and stop exactly where the lit tip of your cigarette would be if you had your hands at 10-to-two and it was 1989: back then, that was a convenience feature. And they were pinched from something else: photographer Sam Chick remembers them from one of his mother’s ’80s Austins, though he’s not sure which, and inside they bear the tiny, roughly-moulded logos of both BL and Rover.
But if you ignore the details and try to see the bigger picture, the cabin is a work of genius. Rover farmed out the interior design to the Conran Group. To some at the time, that decision was as much of a gimmick as the zip-out holdall (sadly missing from our car) that replaced a central storage box. But it’s brilliant to look at, look out of, and use. The dashboard and door cards are graphically perfectly resolved. The spaghetti-thin A-pillars give you an almost uninterrupted, iPhone panorama-shot view of the Highlands. Sir Terence seems to have anticipated the ubiquity of the mobile phone with endless flat shelves covered in grippy stippled rubber. The map shelves and stowage nets in the roof helped establish the versatility on which the modern Discovery is now so heavily marketed, and the folding, side-facing rear seats are a work of genius: they are neatly, artfully integrated into the boot sides and unfurl with a single, simple, well-engineered action. This cabin alone ought to make the Discovery a classic. I’d have mine with the holdall and in the pure ’80s Sonar Blue.
Whatever its failings, the Discovery was a huge hit. A third shift had to be added at Solihull in ’93, and by the time the first generation of the car was replaced in ’98, over a third of a million had been made. The closely related Disco 2 was feeling its age when it was replaced in 2004, but its loyalists refused to believe that it could be improved upon so Land Rover had ⊲
The thin A-pillars give an almost uninterrupted, iPhone panoramashot view of the Highlands
to build an extra 7000 before Geoff Upex’s striking, modernist Discovery 3 could go into production. With its monocoque chassis, the influence of Jaguar’s Mike Cross on its handling and a huge, rectilinear co¡n of a boot still uncompromised by aero demands, that car and the Disco 4 might be the sweet spot in a 30-year history. Good ones hold their value well now.
I’ve brought my long-term-test Discovery 5 along to compare with the original. With its sleek, full forms, its wedgy stance and its 22-inch rims it looks like it has just arrived from outer space when parked next to the J-plate car. But the similarities don’t take long to discern. It still has the stepped roof, the offset rear plate and a hint of the Alpine skylight. The body engineering is still terrible in places: there’s a vicious corner to the bootlid, some really awful, awkward, afterthought trim pieces at the top of the C-pillar, and from the driver’s seat with the door open you can peer down into the unpainted, leaf-filled, sharp-edged recesses of the inner wing. Odd how a company can stay consistently iffy at something for 30 years. But there’s more that’s consistently right about both cars, from the cleverly stowed third row to the vast, versatile cabin. You might not like SUVs, but there’s a reason they’re so popular, and the Discovery has nailed the ‘utility’ part of the SUV equation from the outset.
And there’s a consistency about the way they drive too. The old car’s 200Tdi engine starts with a commercial blast but settles to an acceptable idle, and the manual ’box is worked with a relatively precise, short-throw action. Just 111bhp doesn’t give it much urge on the road: a friend messaged me while I was in Scotland to say that she’d once driven a 200Tdi from the UK to the Alps and it was ‘dreadful’. But off-road, its 195lb ft is more than enough: on the car’s press launch in ’89 a 200Tdi (police-liveried, weirdly) pulled a 178-tonne train. Despite some unforgiving terrain – deep wades, rock climbs and off-piste excursions – old and new just keep buggering on with quiet Brummie doggedness. You keep expecting to have to intervene, but the best approach in any Land Rover is just to let the car get on with it. It’s better at this stuff than you. The early car does it with gears and my car with electronics, but the experience they draw on is the same.
The last Land Rover I drove over Blair Atholl was an early Series 1 from 1949, with a 1.6-litre engine and aluminium bodywork that barely reached my waist. Forty years and a roof separate that car and the original Discovery, but they feel more closely related than the ’89 Disco and my car. The first Land Rover and the original Discovery are both simple, geary, mechanical devices in which you feel part of this extraordinary scenery, not insulated and isolated from it. That’s no criticism of the Disco 5: it’s just why we love old cars but mostly drive new ones. The Series 1 and Disco 1 both feel important: they’re significant, intelligent designs that altered the course of the car industry. The Discovery deserves rediscovery: or at least greater acknowledgement. Buy a three-door now, while a half-decent one is still five grand.
You keep expecting to have to intervene, but the best approach is to let the car get on with it