We’re done with the Range Rover. It’s been almost 4 years since we bought it, and we were supposed to sell it years ago, but we kept it for this long because it was just so darn satisfying to drive around in. But we finally made up our minds and put it up for sale on just our genuinely-popular Facebook page, and sold it in less than a week.
The rainy season is finally upon us in Dubai, if you can call it a season. It hardly rains around here, but when it does, it pours and brings parts of the city to a standstill. With mini-floods building up on dipped roads and certain underpasses, it’s one of those times when we really appreciate our Range Rover.
The Range Rover we had originally intended to keep for only two years is now going to complete almost three years with us in a few months, beyond which we will probably continue to keep it for a while longer, as there’s nothing else that’s quite as appealing at the moment, aside from another Range Rover. Of course, that means keeping up with the maintenance on a decade-old car.
If you own a particularly decent car, loaded with technological giblets and such, have you ever found yourself discovering a completely new feature long after you’d bought the car, not knowing that it existed? It’s a good feeling, like receiving a gift.
While the other cars on our fleet are just toys, the Range Rover is the family vehicle and performs the bulk of our transporting duties. We’ve also trusted it as our luxury ride for important time-sensitive meetings and airport drop-offs. As such, it needs to be reliable. Thankfully our greyish-green Vogue has served us faithfully since 2012 with only minor niggles, especially since we properly take care of it. But it is nearly a decade old and has 111,111 km on it, so we decided to do the inevitable overhaul after it started showing signs of tiredness.
We’ve had our Range Rover for nearly 18 months now. When we bought it, it had some minor cosmetic flaws that we elected to leave as-is at the time, because they didn’t hinder the operation of the car. But we recently decided to keep it for longer than we initially anticipated, so we figured we’ll dress it up and restore its new-car vibe.
So how’s our much-maligned Range Rover doing? Perfectly fine, actually. It’s become our daily driver, used even for the occasional trip to Abu Dhabi. This kind of reliability is more than we ever could’ve hoped for. But the 282 hp 4.4-litre V8 engine is nine years old now, with around 107,000 km on the clock. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see if it has lost any performance over the years, as is supposedly the case with all engines?
Back in the early 1990s, you could get a car key duplicated at any regular key-cutting shop for Dhs 10 and be happy in the knowledge that you’ll always have an unlimited supply of cheap keys for your car. Then the late 90s brought with it the new-fangled transponder-chip anti-theft technologies that could not be duplicated, and the only place to get copies was from the dealer, after a month-long wait to get it shipped from the factory and after going into debt to pay for it. Then we recently heard that half the key-cutting shops in Dubai can now duplicate any key in half an hour.
As much as Land Rover’s PR people like to downplay it, the British carmaker is now owned by India’s Tata, in a role-reversal that took more than 60 years to play out. While we’re still denied the chance to drive the new Range Rover, our own “L322” Range Rover Vogue has been doing a great job as the family minivan.
Apparently, if you keep asking Land Rover’s PR agency politely for the past eight years why you weren’t invited to any of their major press events, they keep saying they have no space. Then when you publicise that they aren’t inviting you to events, instead of making amends, they simply bury their heads in the sand and ban you. So we won’t be able to bring you any review of the Explorer-esque new Range Rover, but we can certainly keep bringing you updates on our very own Range Rover. It’s been four months since we picked it up, and we’ve finally taken it in for an issue that’s been bugging us since we bought it.