Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
on Range Rover drivers. And walls. You and your passengers get to look over walls and
hedges and fences; even a totally familiar route opens up the first time you drive it in one
of these beasts.
Other Defender advantages: they're hard to lose. Take your average car into a
crowded supermarket car park, forget exactly where you left it and you can spend ages
searching for the thing. A Defender is different; as you push your trolley out of the su-
permarket's front doors you can easily spot a Defender because it's the object blocking
out the sun in the near, middle or far distance, depending. And, talking about supermar-
ket trolleys, Defenders laugh in the face of those savage despoilers of metallic-finish car
bodywork. Honestly; you can still feel deeply proud of and even attached to the thing, but
you just stop caring about dings, dents and scratches.
In fact, a Defender doesn't really look quite right until it's got a few dents in its alu-
minium panels (Defenders look somehow distinctly embarrassed when they're all clean
and gleaming, too, and as for the alloy wheels you sometimes see them fitted with …
dearie me). Plus the high floor - at hip-height on me, and I'm just over six feet - is perfect
for loading heavy stuff, much more spine- and disc-friendly than a low car boot, however
commodious.
And, with a little experience, you can throw Defenders about to a surprising degree;
they lean a lot and you're kept very aware indeed that you're driving something over two
metres tall and only five feet wide, but, to some degree, they can be hustled. You can even
get the tyres to squeal, though such larks do tend to alarm one's passengers and as a res-
ult are very much not recommended. They are also very much not recommended because
that squealing noise from the rubber bits generally means you are a frighteningly small
speed increment away from executing a series of spectator-spectacular but incumbent-in-
jurious rolls-cum-somersaults immediately prior to becoming an embedded part, or parts,
of the nearby scenery.
Last advantage. This really only affects people in London for now, but if I read the
rules correctly, you can drive a Land Rover like mine into the central charging zone
of London without having to pay the congestion charge. I'm not saying you
should
, of
course, but I think in theory you could.
This is because a 110 County Station Wagon of this vintage has at least ten passenger
seats. In theory it has eleven, believe it or not, but that includes the central seat in the front
right beside the driver, where your passenger basically gets sexually assaulted every time
an even-numbered gear is selected. Most people replace this effectively useless so-called
seat with a cubby box for storing handy Landy stuff. As a result of this bizarre prolifer-
ation of seats and seat belts, the vehicle is effectively classed as a bus, and while it does
mean that you face the added expense of an MOT from year one of ownership, not year
