One careful owner
OVER the years the Land Rover company has been the first registered owner of many thousands of its own products. Many of these, especially in more recent years, will have been management fleet vehicles: standard production Discoverys and Freelanders issued as company cars. Some will have been press fleet vehicles or dealer demonstrators. But Land Rover was also in the habit, until concerns over product liability stopped the practice, of selling off development vehicles, with the result that from time to time I have a vehicle come through the door which has some interesting history behind it.
There are certain combinations of vehicle registration letters which always make me sit up and pay attention. Prior to 2001 the system used a two-letter identifier to show the district in which the vehicle was first registered. For example, in the registration number UWN 905H, the letters “WN” indicate that the vehicle (a disreputable Triumph Herald which I ran for a year as a teenager before selling it to help fund my first Land Rover) was registered new in Swansea. Most Land Rover company vehicles were registered in either Solihull or Coventry, so registrations to look out for are *AC, *DU, *HP, *KV, *VC, *WK or *XC. Of course it may simply be that the vehicle was sold new by the local Land Rover dealer and was never anything to do with the factory. At one time it was possible to write to DVLA and obtain the details of previous registered keepers but I believe that data protection concerns have put a stop to this.
If you have a Land Rover which you think might be a factory-registered vehicle it is worth joining the CVC Register group on Facebook. It might be that your vehicle is one of which the group will already be aware: a good example is the fairly large batch of identical Russet Brown Series III petrol seven-seater Station Wagons sent out to dealers for the launch of the County trim package and issued with consecutive registrations in the series XKV ***X.
Over the years I have had a few company-registered vehicles pass through the workshop. Going back a long way further I am ashamed to admit that I pulled the original V8 engine out of a Stage One 109-inch Series III and replaced it with an old Perkins lump.
Had I known about company registrations back then I might have hesitated before carrying out the work: JVC 821V was a Stage One development prototype. I still feel guilty about that one. In my defence I was very young and very, very broke.
Over the last few months I have had a little flurry of vehicles with registrations that made me take a closer look. I had a brace of Defender 90 station wagons on *VC plates, both with umpteen previous owners and no known history. One was a bog-standard 300Tdi: perhaps a management fleet vehicle or demonstrator, perhaps nothing to do with the factory at all. The other one was rather more interesting, factory painted in Beluga Black and fitted with heavy insulation inside the front wheelarches, something I have only ever seen on Scandinavian market vehicles. I suspect that one might have an interesting history, if only I could find it.
But by far the most intriguing was a battle-scarred One Ten Station Wagon in faded green. I first saw this vehicle last year when it came in for some attention to the fuel system: this year it returned for its annual MOT test and a bit of fettling. It is a bit unusual in its own right, being a left-hand drive 200Tdi with factory air conditioning (now decommissioned), but it was the registration number which grabbed my attention. G*** EAC looked like a good candidate for a factory-registered vehicle, and the earliest 200Tdi I have previously seen has been on an H-plate. So I asked the owner whether he knew anything of the vehicle’s history, and it turned out to be something rather special.
Paul Jones has owned this Defender since it was two years old. He purchased it from a dealer specialising in left-hand drive vehicles, who had acquired it direct from Land Rover with 80,000 kilometres already racked up in its short life. It was substantially cheaper than a right-hand drive vehicle (especially one with fewer miles on the clock) and having the steering wheel on the “wrong” side made it ideal for touring Europe, which is exactly what Paul used it to do. In the aftermath of the collapse of communism the Defender visited most of the former Eastern Bloc countries from Poland to Lithuania. After more than 30 years and almost 300,000 kilometres the old beast is looking its age: Paul says that even when he bought the vehicle the paint was poor and some of the aluminium body panels were starting to bubble around the edges.
The vehicle appears to be to full production specification as far as I can tell, and has a very low-numbered engine (Defender engine number 27 off the production line. It was registered in July 1990, a couple of months ahead of the official launch of the Defender, so my suspicions about that “G” registration turned out to be correct. If I had to guess I would say it was a pre-production vehicle possibly used for hot weather testing, with the desert sun having taken its toll on the paintwork at an early stage. It would be interesting to know more about its history.
When Paul came to pick up the vehicle I did what I always do, which was to fetch a torque wrench from the toolbox and check that all the wheel nuts were torqued up correctly. Normally I do this before the owner turns up. Forgetting to tighten wheel nuts and then having a wheel come off a customer's vehicle is one of the things that keep garage mechanics awake at night. Paul then told me what had led to him purchasing the Defender back in 1992.
It was not his first Land Rover by any means. Until a few months previously he had owned a Series III 109 inch Station Wagon which (like its replacement) he had used extensively for touring Europe. Its last trip could very easily have been his last trip as well. He picked the vehicle up from a garage where it had been given a full service, loaded it up to somewhere close to its maximum rated payload and headed east. On a snow-covered road a long way from home, one of the rear wheels came loose. There was no hope of retaining control: the Land Rover left the road and ended up on its roof. Paul reckons it was only his seat belt that saved him. Ever since then he has checked the tightness of his Land Rover’s wheel nuts regularly, and always before a long journey. When did you last check yours?