Don’t waste tears on Land Rover. It is the author of its own demise

The Range Rover has long inspired the French, being the first car ever exhibited as a work of art at the Louvre. Soon, though, they might own the brand. Jaguar Land Rover, part of Tata Motors since 2008, has announced a tie-up with, and possible sale to, the French PSA group, makers of Peugeot and Citroen.

It is tempting to go all weepy-eyed over an event many will see as a nail in the coffin of a great British industrial icon. But then I think of all those poor Land Rover drivers reading this as they await a breakdown truck. If the outside lane is often nicknamed the “BMW lane”, the hard shoulder should be dubbed the “Land Rover lane”.

What PSA will be picking up is a sad remnant of a once-great automotive icon. Last year’s What Car? reliability survey, which follows the experiences of 18,000 motorists, told us yet again what numerous other questionnaires have revealed over the years. The Range Rover, Range Rover Evoque and Land Rover Discovery filled respectively places two, four and five on the list of least-reliable cars, with the Range Rover only beaten into second place by Tesla.

It would be an embarrassing enough performance for any make, but for a luxury brand whose cheapest car costs more than £30,000, it is a disgrace – the opposite of what Land Rovers stood for when introduced in 1948. They might have rattled a bit and lacked style, but they were dependable – and, if they ever did break down, were simple to repair. Never mind reaching a distant ewe in the advanced stages of labour, the latest models struggle to reach the supermarket. In the What Car? survey, a staggering half of all owners reported experiencing a fault in the preceding 12 months.

Nothing marked the decline of Land Rover so greatly as the discontinuation of the original model, called the Defender in recent years, in 2016. Having withdrawn from the market for people who genuinely need 4x4s – farmers, the military and so on – Land Rover is left only with the ridiculous market for Chelsea tractors: four-wheel-drive cars for people who will never need that facility. There is a new Defender model coming out next year, but it looks like just another executive’s plaything – not a tough vehicle where you can repair the fan belt with a pair of tights.

With our cities choked and a growing rebellion against air pollution, the last market you want to be in now is that for big, bad diesel cars. Land Rover’s token electric model won’t save it – electric cars will have to be smaller and lighter than existing models if they are going to do anything more useful than drag around heavy sets of batteries. Sir Jim Ratcliffe, owner of Ineos, is the wise one – he is planning to fill the hole left behind by the old Defender with a no-frills 4x4 for people who need them.

As for Land Rover’s other products, they deserve to be shunted from the Louvre to the basement of an archaeology museum.