High miler
This 60 plate Range Rover 4.4 TD V8 Autobiography has rather astonishingly gone round the clock three times!
This Range Rover has gone round the clock three times and it’s still going strong
LAND Rover fans are a special breed. While the rest of the population use their smartphones and laptops to play games and argue with friends about soap operas, we can be seen scouring the classifieds looking for bargain Land Rovers and parts.
It was on one of these scours when this Range Rover popped up. It stood out from all the others because it was priced below the £10,000 search limit, but was a good few years younger than the others in that price range. It was also in Autobiography specification with the desirable 4.4-litre V8 twin-turbo diesel, in a tasteful colour with a sensible selection of options. Full service history and one owner? Check. HPI clear, with no accident damage? Check. All at an advertised price of £8495.
The mileage also seemed fine: just 32,700. Nice and low. The advert says 327,000 but that must be a mistake, right? The dealer has put an extra zero in the advert with a slip of the keyboard, surely? Wrong. This Autobiography really has covered the distance between the Earth and the Moon, and almost half the way back again.
Given that Range Rovers have something of a reputation for fragility, this is a car we had to investigate closely. So we went to see what story this Autobiography had to tell.
The car is for sale at Platinum Autos in Bledlow, an upmarket Buckinghamshire village which is in commutable distance to London. Prime Range Rover territory. Pulling up onto the selling dealer’s forecourt and all looks good with the car we have come to see. When it was new, the owner paid a whopping £83,725 for it, having ticked the option boxes for the four zone air con, a tow bar, full size spare and even £120 for a luggage net.
The Baltic Blue paint and 20 inch wheels were included as part of the Autobiography package, along with a list of luxuries that are still impressive almost a decade after the car rolled out of the showroom.
Get closer to the car and the scars of those years and miles start to show though. According to the selling dealer, Bill Ajaib, the owner used to drive at least once a week from London to Glasgow – hence the mileage. “He just got on the motorway, set the cruise to 80mph and went up and down the country. Every bill was put through the company and whatever needed doing was done.”
That might have been true of the mechanicals, but not necessarily the cosmetics. Those 327,000 miles of tarmac clearly have thrown up the odd bit of debris and salt, and as a result this car is a proper ‘40 footer’ – that is it looks great at 40 feet, but the illusion starts to wear off as you get closer. Some mild corrosion acne is starting to bubble under the paint on the tailgate and doors while the lacquer is peeling in a couple of places.
The wheels look scruffy too, with corroded centre caps and weird brown discolouration on the rears, possibly caused by over-enthusiastic use of acid cleaner. But the tyres look almost new and are the Lr-approved (and expensive) Pirelli Scorpions; a good indicator of a cost-no-object maintenance regime on this car.
Inside, the commonly-pressed buttons for the radio and navigation look a little grubby, and the driver’s seat is naturally worn. Both keys look as though they have lost a fight with a pocket full of coins over the past nine years of life, too. But everything still works and the attention of a good smart repairer would make this Autobiography look like a million dollars again.
Underneath has fared better than the top, unusually. There’s sign of some surface rust on some of the suspension components and the rear arches are starting to flake inside the rear door as they have on every Range Rover since the Classic. But it’s nothing that an afternoon with a wire brush and a can of wax wouldn’t sort.
We asked to see the paperwork and were hoping for an entire filing cabinet to be wheeled out for us to pore through every detailed invoice. Sadly, there’s just a single plastic file with the MOT and a well-thumbed service book. Every scheduled service has been stamped, and when the book was full after three years and 144,000 miles, the dealer just stamped the blank back of the book cover. Then, seven services and 100,000 miles later, a new page had to be stapled in. At its most active, the car was doing 40,000 miles a year
“The advert says 327,000 miles but that must be a mistake, right?”
and needed a service every four months.
All but the last three were done by a Land Rover franchised dealer – JLC in London’s Herne Hill. We asked the workshop boss James Lewis about the car, and requested that he share the invoices so we could get an idea of what had been done. He said: “I remember the car very well. As much as I would like to send you all the work previously carried out by JLC on this vehicle due to it being such a great advert for Land Rover, I unfortunately cannot disclose any information about this or share any previous invoices due to GDPR.”
We checked with a solicitor and it turns out that the data protection law actually only applies to people not cars, so as long as the owner’s personal details are not shared it wouldn’t be a problem – a good point to remember if you wish to check the history of a car you’re buying and the dealer tries to block it. But James didn’t want to risk telling us anyway.
With that avenue blocked by legal paranoia, we can only guesstimate what the servicing alone would have cost. Using the Land Rover website prices, this car’s 22 services – alternating between minor and major – will have cost £10,560. Add in the necessary brake replacements, extra fluid changes and other bits and the total bill won’t have been less than £15,000 before any big failures have been factored in. New tyres every 30,000 miles would add another £9000.
Add to that the cost of fuel and the running cost figures are even more frightening. The trip computer was showing an average of 30.1 mpg; type that into a calculator using an average diesel cost over the last decade of £1.20 a litre and the total comes up at £59,350. That’s a lot of Nectar points.
It might have cost more than £24,000 in maintenance alone, but there’s no doubt that it has kept this Autobiography in top health, as we found on a test drive. The 4.4-litre V8 twin-turbo diesel is an amazing engine and, even having carried a 2.6 tonne Range Rover about for 327,000 miles, it still feels strong. Press the starter button and it comes to life easily with no smoke or unusual rattles. As this is a 4.4, it uses the later eight-speed gearbox with a selector dial rather than a lever. Click round to D and the car moves off as majestically as you’d expect from a Range Rover.
Most L322 owners have also come to expect – or dread – something else: the bong of a computerised warning followed by an unwelcome message on the instrument panel. Even a ‘low screen wash’ chime has been known to cause wallet palpitations. But there are no nasty messages on LD60UOW’S TFT screen. The computer-generated dials show nothing is amiss as the suspension raises up evenly and we are wafting away onto the roads of rural Buckinghamshire with the airconditioned seats gently cooling our behinds.
Anyone who drives a Range Rover will know what a joy it can be. Refined, effortless and extreme comfort are to be expected; the real pleasure is the respect it garners from other road users. In the countryside, a straight-looking car like this one, unadorned by the bodykits and big wheels of urban-dwelling SUVS, seems to earn you a higher place on the drivers’ pecking order. People let you out at junctions and pull over to let you pass on narrow roads. Perhaps they assume you are important, or maybe a minor royal. Little do they know that this particular Range Rover could be bought for less than the price of their Kia Picanto.
So, are you tempted? It’s very cheap for an uncrashed 4.4 TDV8 Autobiography, but is it priced low enough to make you take the risk? We asked the vendor Bill Ajaib how he had valued it: “The owner had a price quoted online and knew the company would knock him down for every stonechip when he turned up with the car, so we agreed to match that price. I wouldn’t have been interested if it had several owners or a patchy history. Of course it has to be cheaper than other Range Rovers of the same age, but there comes a point when a car like this hits a base level price, simply because it is desirable. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns up abroad somewhere with the mileage ‘adjusted’!”
Which would be a great shame. This Range Rover is almost a national treasure. It deserves to get a light restoration by someone who will keep it in fine fettle, maybe taking it up to the half million mark. That’s an extra 172,500 miles, which itself is beyond the expected life span of most cars. But to this remarkable Range Rover, it’s merely rounding up its total.