"It’s meant to be capable of surviving the Serengeti, but mine can’t even get across Surrey.”
So writes a friend from the side of the road, watching his Land Rover Defender depart on a flatbed truck, ruing with quite some fury the £10,000 premium that he paid to a main dealer in September in order to jump the queue to buy one of the world’s most desirable cars.
At this point, I suspect you will be feeling two emotions. One of disbelief that anyone could buy a Land Rover expecting it to be reliable and the other involving a violin and a bleeding heart. Forgive him: he’s an incurable car lover with the means to support his habit, and that shouldn’t exclude him from expecting better.
The list of faults to date include multiple gearbox issues, ongoing software glitches that are never quite fixed and a sunroof seal that, amusingly to everyone but him, the local squirrels found incredibly tasty. Hardly a great look for a rugged, go-anywhere car.
Winding his fury up to snapping point, solutions haven’t been easy to find.
“I have a number of friends who have dealt with the dealership in question in the past. They’re now happy customers of Aston Martin and Porsche,” he laments.
There are two sides to the story, of course. I drove a Defender for three months earlier this year and it never went wrong. But let’s not fool ourselves that my friend is alone, because Land Rover’s reliability problems are the stuff of legend.
Last year, it came 29th out of 30 brands in the What Car? Reliability Survey, with only Fiat lagging behind. It also came stone last in JD Power’s annual customer satisfaction survey.
A high price brings higher expectations, perhaps, but for years improvements have been promised, yet I can find no data that demonstrates they’ve been delivered.
What’s sad is that, for all this, he still loves his car – or at least the idea of it. Land Rover trades on desirability and serves it up like few others. But no matter how many monarchs or sports stars are pictured in its cars, real people who have spent real money are only going to allow themselves to get burned so many times. The lengthy order books suggest there’s still demand, but for how long can it keep disappointing customers?
“Yes,” my friend went on, “I shelled out £86,000 for a car that I knew wouldn’t be reliable and I knew I would experience poor service with. I’m a bit sad that it has been more unreliable and the service even worse than anticipated. What makes me really cross is that it’s a car that I adore. Despite buying a car that’s subjectively brilliant, if objectively flaky, I’m bitterly disappointed. Most of all with myself.”
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