Dijon 2, Ded Car

[husson73]

my lovely girl runs japanses cars (Honda) since twenty years never have troubles

[Wolfie]

She's been giddy since we went to see it on Sat, I daresay she's out there now stroking it..

[Hogie]

I do wonder if you will miss the Landy in the long run Graham. I am still running my 98 Defender and would rather give up beer than sell it for a modern car. It does go wrong occasionally but it is easy to fix and 'involving ' to drive.
I am sure Jane will love the Nissan but maybe you need 2 cars

[Wolfie]

To say that Landrover are the worlds foremost 4x4 car company, the Freelander was pretty poor, poor design, moderate to drive, very low geared but still pretty gutless really, mostly because the transmission itself sapped most of the power and consequently affected the fuel economy. It would stall when the steering was turned far unless it was gunned to overcome the transmission resistance.

The interior was painted tin with hard plastic, the speaker grills went rusty very early on.. you couldn't hear the radio anyhow. The passenger glovebox was about two inches deep, the cars books wouldn't even fit in there and just below it the fan housing protruded in to the footwell so passengers constantly kicked it and it was in their foot area. the drivers "glovebox" door was designed to break yer kneecaps in the event of a crash and had room for fk all except the stupid key to undo the rear soft/hard top.
It had a removeable hard top, which needed the roofbars removing first to get it off, for the sake of about an inch of extra clearance, the softtop was similarly hard to fit, it was a lesson in origami to fold it forwards and took a good half hour to do it as per the book, there were little fittings to add and screw down, brackets to add, windows to unzip and put in bags, safety covers to fit on the metal struts.. nightmare. If it rained everything would be piss wet through before you had rebuilt it back, so Landrover's solution was to sell an elasticated rain cover to fill the hole.. we put the soft top on once in it's life..

The back lights were designed along the traditional look except.. those weren't the lights, the important lights were right at the bottom in the plastic bumper where they would get broken at the slightest knock, the (safer) ones above were reversing and fog lights only.. I almost altered the wiring to swap them over at one point.

We bought some sidesteps as extras, the fookin things tapered into the body, right where you needed to step on them for getting in and out and were wide at the back where you never stood on them (I though about fitting them back to front).

Sorry.. I could go on, but Janey loved it for years and only fell out with it later in life, it was really nice as a new car, that novelty soon wore thin and by leaving time all these little things were just a pain.. it was a practical solution at the time, dogs and horse stuff could go in the back and it would pull the horsebox up slippery fields. Jane was also worried about snow, and there has been very little since we got it.

I daresay the new one will have some foibles that grate after a while, our situation has changed and this one is more for comfort and show, they are very popular and I was hard pressed to find bad comments about em, the early ones had poor fuel economy because of low gearing but that has been addressed. I already find it very twitchy to drive, we'll see how it goes long term.