Your Views The day my dad beat F1 champ Jim Clark

Loren Nikolovski did an effective piece of Land Rover-bashing (Your Views, 15 July), and similar comments have appeared in Autocar before.

While I grant that Land Rover has had important issues with reliability in the past, and may still have some, such attacks can possibly convey that other makes are totally without fault.

I spent just over 30 years in the motor trade, exclusively with franchised dealers, giving me first-hand experience of Mercedes-benz, Audi,

Volvo, Rover and, yes, Land Rover. None of the manufacturers listed produced a perfect product, although some made a better fist of it than others.

Selecting Mercedes-benz, I sold the product during the days of the much-venerated W123, W124 and R107, yet from time to time I was still confronted with an angry customer complaining: “I didn’t buy a Mercedes for this to happen.”

Moreover, throughout my time in the trade, I noted the media seemed to have a blindspot on poor reliability of foreign cars. Perhaps it’s a unique British characteristic to knock one’s own products more actively?

On retirement, my company car had to be replaced by one purchased with my own money. I chose a nearly new Skoda Octavia in view of its good value and reputed reliability. Sadly, it spent an inordinate amount of time at the local Skoda dealer, having one problem after another fixed. I was at the garage so frequently that I hardly felt like I had left the trade.

Shortly before the Octavia’s warranty expired, I bought a new BMW. This has been better but, disappointingly, still not 100%. But then, as an old boss once reminded me: “The perfect car hasn’t been invented yet.” Jeff Loomes

Hartley, Kent