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Land Rover Freelander - Dog and Lemon Guide
Published by Guset User, 2015-04-19 04:49:02


Land Rover Freelander 1997-06 Quick Summary Possibly the most incompetently designed and built four-wheel drive in history. How Reliable? Appalling. See ‘what goes wrong’ below ☛ How Safe? Dodgy:

Fact 1 THERE’S a weird story of how the Land Rover Freelander came into being; believe it or not, the Honda CR-V and the Land Rover Freelander are actually distant cousins. If you’ve got time, you should read this story. If not, skip down a few paragraphs to the review itself. Britain’s car industry had been in decline for decades by the time the government nationa- lised most of it in 1975. The nationalised Brit- ish car companies were turned into a corporation called British Leyland, which owned, among other brands, Rover and Land Rover. The new chairman of British Leyland, Sir Mi- chael Edwardes, closed down or sold off most of the British Leyland companies and in 1982 re- named the company as the Austin Rover Group, later shortened to just the Rover Group. As part of the modernisation of the Rover Group, Edwardes arranged a deal with the Honda Motor Co to share technology and manufacturing facilities in England .

[b]Thus, Honda gained access to the lucrative Euro- pean market, while Rover gained access to success- ful Honda technology. For this reason, most Rover cars of the era were based around existing Honda vehicles and many used a combination of Honda and Rover technol- ogy. One of the Honda-Rover joint projects was a small SUV, to be built using a combination of Honda and Rover parts. In 1988, the Rover Group was privatised and sold off to British Aerospace. However, by 1991 British Aerospace was in financial trouble as well. The Rover Group was still bleeding money, so British Aerospace sold the Rover Group to BMW without consulting Honda. Stunned at this sudden reversal, Honda with- drew from its arrangement with the Rover Group and retreated back to Japan. Safe at home, Honda proceeded with its own version of the planned SUV – based on the Honda Civic – and later released it as the original Honda CR-V.
Rover – known within BMW as ‘The English Patient’ – was left to continue with its SUV proj- ect, which became the Freelander.[/b]

In order to save money, Rover didn’t design this new vehicle from scratch, instead they recycled the basic body of the Rover 200, which in turn was also a recycled 1980s Honda Civic. Despite having billions in funding from BMW, Rover managed the breathtaking feat of utilising the worst bits of the Honda-Rover vehicles, such as the flimsy Honda Civic body, while filling this flimsy body with utterly inept British and Euro- pean technology. Rover’s poorly designed and badly assembled technology was one of the main reasons the Rover Group went bankrupt in 2005.
The Freelander was released onto the market with over 132 serious faults, all of which were known to Land Rover management as the vehicles rolled out the door. Early versions for motoring journalists were hand-picked, because anything else was likely to break down.

You’d think that the people who produced this car would be in prison. But that’s not how it works in the motor industry. For producing one of the most incompetently designed and built four-wheel drives in history, Land Rover was rewarded with record sales. In fact, between 1997 and 2002, the Freelander was Europe’s best-selling four-wheel drive. Why didn’t the motoring press expose this scam? Because – mostly – they’re part of it. Even when motoring journalists – especially Brit- ish journalists – acknowledge Land Rover’s ap- palling track record, they tend to use euphemisms such as: “The Land Rover’s reliability hasn’t always been perfect”. The tone of the review is always that of a stern headmaster with a twinkle in his eye, mildly re- buking a bright but mischievous pupil.7 All content

If there’s any justice in the universe, the journal- ists who recommended these vehicles will spend all eternity fixing broken down Land Rovers in the middle of some hellish wilderness, with hyenas snapping at their heels. Because that’s the fate that many Land Rover owners have suffered. The entire Land Rover range hovers, gloriously, around the bottom of any reliability survey. Most owners who say their Land Rovers have been reliable are English and they are frequently in a state of near-total denial. Just after telling you that their vehicle has been very reliable, they’ll acknowledge that they might have had ‘one or two issues’. That’s a bit like an alcoholic saying he might have had one or two drinks.

And yet, people keep buying Land Rovers, in- cluding the Freelander. Not only are most Europeans in denial about how bad Land Rovers and other Euro models are, but they seem to believe that considering a car from Ja- pan or Korea would mean a loss of face. This is because European – and especially British – car purchases are based on snobbery: I’m better than you, higher up the food chain than you, wealthier than you, more fashionable than you – and I can prove it by my vehicle. Thus, when you point out to many wealthy Eng- lish folk that a Honda or Toyota will leave any Eu- ropean car for dead when it comes to both value and reliability, your words will fall on deaf ears.9 All content © The Dog & Lemon Guide 2013 All rights reserved

+ Affordability and reliability, to the English snob, are obsessions of the poor and needy – if those con- siderations are a high priority, it means that you’re in the lower part of the food chain. This snobbish pomposity, of course, costs them dearly. Every European carmaker is dedicated to emptying the wallets of gullible snobs. In exchange for the temporary thrill of having the latest model in the office carpark, the snobbish buyer is probably going to have to put in several extra months or years of hard grind in order to pay the inflated purchase price plus the exorbitant interest on the hire pur- chase. This shiny piece of fragile automotive status will be out of date in two or three years, and will have lost most of its value by then. Madness.10 All content © The Dog & Lemon Guide 2013 All rights reserved

The Freelander was offered in two basic versions: a three-door and a five-door, with variations such as convertible roof on three-door versions. Most people opted for five-door versions due to the near-total lack of space in the rear of three-door versions. The Freelander had a visual freshen-up in 2002 and again in 2004, with some of the more dire me- chanical bits replaced with bits that were almost as bad.

The Freelander’s height above smaller passenger cars and commanding driving position make it a satisfying city commuter. Many of the Freelander’s owners have been ur- ban women, which is unsurprising, because the Freelander is more suited to small-to-average sized rather than tall people. In order to gain that SUV sense of elevation and importance, the front seats have been positioned far too high, so that tall people will find their heads hitting the roof. Tall people will also find it difficult to see clearly out the front windscreen. Worse, there’s no height adjustment for the front seats. There’s no need for this high seating posi- tion; it’s just designed to make small people feel bigger.