Normally Shed refuses to engage in politics, but now that our glorious leaders have exited their battle buses and disconnected themselves from their bungee hooks he feels it’s OK to put the final boot in by reminding you of Winston Churchill’s reputed reply to 1920s socialite Viscountess Nancy Astor after she had accused him of being drunk. “Yes madam, I am drunk,” he said, “and you are ugly, but tomorrow I will be sober.”
You might be entertaining similar thoughts about this week’s shed. It’s a top-spec HSE L322 Range Rover TD6 with a freshly printed and advisory-free MOT certificate, a very low number of owners, and a drunken look courtesy of Martini stripes.
Sticking any kind of stripe onto a Range Rover is a bit like sticking Mrs Shed into a leotard, i.e. the last recourse of a complete bounder. If we’re talking glue rather than paint here, it shouldn’t take you long with a suitable scraper and a hot air gun to reveal the correct amount of bodywork. That technique should work on the car too.
Once that’s done, what will you have left? When buying a badly decorated house you need a little imagination to see through the visual outrage. When buying any old Range Rover it’s also handy to have the superpower of X-ray vision to help you identify the oh-so-many ways in which it can blight your life. In lieu of that Shed recommends as an absolute minimum the purchase of a diagnostic tool and some high-quality breakdown cover.
Top of the flops list would be the air suspension. Height sensors and compressors fail with depressing regularity. Thing is though, neither of these faults needs to be difficult or expensive to resolve. The good thing about Land Rover as a marque is that it’s supported by a vibrant community of owners who see problems and low-cost solutions as part of the fun. The compressor issues are often nothing more than leaky seals. You can get rebuild kits to sort that for less than £15 including postage. If the pump has actually died, even that’s not a disaster as you can buy a replacement for well under £200 and the installation procedure is incredibly straightforward, a fact that LR dealers would prefer you not to know about.
What else is good? Well, the BMW M57 2.9-litre inline-six single-turbo diesel did OK in vehicles such as the E39 530d, the E38 730d, and some E46 330ds, where its outputs of 174hp and 288lb were more than adequate, but it did struggle to shove the 2.4-tonne RR along at a pace that was much more than leisurely. Any attempts to beat the ox into a trot would just generate bigger fuel bills.
The 2007-on 4.4 litre TDV8 was leagues better in this regard but it’s a sure bet that you won’t find an MOT’d one of them for £1,690. There are some quite well-qualified folk who will tell you that the M57 was the worst engine ever, but it did have a 15-year production lifespan from 1998 to 2013 so it can’t have been that bad. As ever, it’s all about the maintenance, and unfortunately that’s seen as optional by many used RR owners who are hoping for the RR lifestyle without the RR bills.
Inside we see leather that’s not too shredded and the vendor confidently mentions the electric sunroof so the assumption there is that it works. The mileage is about average for one of these and two owners from new sounds like a good thing. The clean MOT runs to the end of next May but it’s important to take that with a pinch of salt, a substance many RR owners harvest from their tears.
We had a TD6 L322 that on here back in March ‘23. It was dirty and neglected but apparently it ran fine and its most recent MOT (November ’22 with 134k on the clock) was an irresistible lure, mentioning nothing more worrisome than a couple of worn ARB joints. Whoever bit on that one might have regretted it because the MOT wasn’t renewed when it expired last November, suggesting that a fully charged-up crystal ball would be another useful L322 tool. Shed would like to help you there but unfortunately he can’t as all his balls are broken.
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