GARY PUSEY
The three rules of Land Rovering
“The second rule of successful Land Rovering is eternal optimism, so we took comfort in the fact it was only an amber warning and I was confident we’d get home”
Ilearned a long time ago that three things are vital if Land Rover ownership is to be a pleasurable experience. The first, of course, is to have a robust sense of humour. That’s why my wife and I found ourselves rolling around at the sheer hilarity of our most recent Land Rover-induced predicament. Or not. In January last year, I wrote about our family holiday to Ireland in our Range Rover 300Tdi, which decided to blow a top hose and dump all its coolant just as we were hurrying to catch an overnight ferry from Rosslare to Fishguard. It wasn’t as if it was an ancient top hose. I’d replaced it the year before and it was a Genuine Part that did not come cheap. It was obvious even to me that the hose was not repairable, and I had to arrange for the vehicle to be recovered to the local Land Rover main dealer in Waterford. They confirmed that the hose could not be fixed and, of course, they didn’t have a replacement for such an ancient Range Rover.
To cut a long story short, we had to put up in a local hotel for the night while I tracked down the only 300Tdi top hose in the Republic of Ireland. We missed the ferry. Wife, daughter and dogs were deeply unimpressed. The following morning I hired a car and set off on the four-hour round trip to Dublin to pick up the hose. The local dealer back in Waterford installed it and we were on our way, albeit a day later than planned. Once home, dark mutterings from wife and daughter (I think the dogs were in cahoots with the conspiracy as well) led to a suggestion that we ought to have a more modern, reliable, and faster vehicle for our trips to Ireland.
And that’s why I was finally persuaded to buy the full-fat and undoubtedly luxurious 2011 Range Rover TDV8 from a good friend, having managed to suspend my discomfort with the level of on-board electrickery. Cherished by its previous owner and with only 90,000 miles on the clock, I expected a good few years of reliable Land Rover motoring, and it’s taken us to and from Ireland on several occasions already. And here we were again, in the lovely little West Cork town of Skibbereen, when wife and I were hugely amused when a big amber warning triangle popped up in the middle of the digital dashboard shouting ‘Suspension Fault’ at us. My heart sank only slightly slower than the nearside rear wheel.
But the second rule of successful Land Rovering is eternal optimism, so we took comfort in the fact that it was only an amber warning and, since the car was still drivable, we continued with our plan to meet friends for lunch in the town, and I was quietly confident that we’d get home. When we set off
after lunch the warning had disappeared and all seemed normal. Even more reason to think that my optimism was well-placed. Just a playful little gremlin in the works, I thought to myself, but two miles out of town the warning came back, the car decided to rise up to maximum ride height, and then we were treated to a less-playful red warning triangle as the vehicle slumped down onto the bump stops.
We limped back to the holiday cottage at no more than the 30 mph advised by the digital dash. Actually, I’m making that bit up. The roads thereabouts are not what you’d call billiard tables, so in fact we limped home at 15 mph. Given previous experiences, my eternal optimism does not extend to not bothering with overseas recovery insurance, and the following day the disgraced Range Rover was gingerly dragged onto a flatbed and delivered to the main dealer in Cork, two hours away. Luckily there was enough food in the cottage to sustain the dogs and us for our extended and car-less two- day wait, while the service team at the dealer worked their way through the diagnostics system.
The result was not encouraging. Regular updates from the charming lady who runs the workshop told me that the amber and red warnings were coming and going, but now the diagnostic system was giving a clean bill of health. The gremlin was banished! But a further call an hour or so later revealed that the vehicle was randomly going from maximum suspension height to bump-stops and back again, and the recommendation was to replace the nearside rear ride height sensor. At least this time it wasn’t me who had to go to Dublin to collect the replacement part, which of course proves the value of the third rule of Land Rover ownership, which is to console yourself that it could have been worse.
Except on this occasion it was, because the Irish Met Office had just upgraded its weather warning for the incoming Storm Hannah from Orange to Red, and there was a real risk that our ferry would not sail. Eternal optimism to the fore, we nevertheless collected the Range Rover and set off for Rosslare. As luck would have it we were blessed with a gung-ho captain who decided to sail anyway, and we were on the last ship to attempt the crossing of the Irish Sea that evening. It was certainly a memorable voyage. The dogs were, once again, not impressed.