Top of the range
THE DISCOVERY 300Tdi about which I wrote last month has certainly been earning its keep, having covered over 1000 miles in three weeks and much of that towing a trailer. Most of this has been down to a house move, which in my usual tight-fisted do-it-yourself fashion I accomplished with a plant trailer and sack barrow rather than paying a firm of professionals to do it for me. If you saw my furniture you would understand my reluctance to spend too much money on moving it a few miles up the road.
In between shifting trailer-loads of household goods I somehow found the time to go and fetch another Discovery 300Tdi which I had agreed to buy as an engine donor. It had been used for off-roading until the MOT ran out, then dumped on a driveway for four years and treated as a sort of covered skip for dumping assorted rubbish. The engine (a replacement unit with a reputedly 70,000 miles from new) ran very sweetly, but that was about all that could be said in its favour.
My old Discovery has been going much better since I adjusted the kickdown cable to take out about an inch of slack, and it handled the recovery of its luckless brother to the workshop with no trouble at all. As I cleared out the assorted junk from the back of the donor vehicle I realised it was kitted out to quite a high specification, with leather seats (sadly ruined by water ingress through the twin sunroofs), airbags, remote headlight height adjustment and various other bits which my own vehicle (two years newer) lacks.
Then my friend Lee wandered over to take a look. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing at the roof lining. ‘That’ was a set of air vents mounted in the roof, pointing towards the rear seats. Further investigation revealed that the vehicle was fitted with dual zone air conditioning, with separate controls for front and rear, and a separate air conditioning unit tucked away in the nearside rear corner of the vehicle, with the ducting hidden by an extra-wide pillar trim and partially blacked out rear quarter window.
I don’t know how rare this option was back in 1993, but this is the first Discovery I have ever seen fitted with this system. Top of the range? Absolutely, and it seems a shame somehow that it has just been run into the ground and scrapped. But the bodyshell is rotten absolutely everywhere that Discoverys can rot, the mechanicals are worn out, the interior is ruined and you would have to be insane to think it worth salvaging. At least the engine will live on (in a remarkably straight and tidy ex-military One Ten), and the vehicle came with a nice set of Climair wind deflectors which now adorn my own Discovery. All’s well that ends well.