Considering adding to the fleet (well, swapping the A-Class for something less crap)...
It's still pretty efficient to run a Double Cab as a company vehicle, so in a straight shootout between the 110 Double Cab and the Nissan Navara Adventura, which do I choose?
Purchase price is near enough not to matter, but favours the Nissan. Residuals probably cancel out the difference.
Nissan is leather and full of nice toys. Defender is a Land Rover.... Off road ability will be good enough in either.
I'm likely to do 30,000 miles a year in this truck, about 75% of them on a motorway.
I don't know about the financial side, but a customer has a Navara (6 month old) and it makes LR build quality look quite good! Last night the entire upper tailgate latch mechanism did a Range Rover and fell to bits! Again.
The flanks are very reminiscent of the new Discovery. The interior is from a different century to the Defender as well. It's a bit bling for my tastes, but I'll be sat inside it rather than looking at it so I'm not too fussed on that score.
In the Defender's favour is that it's a Land Rover and that there's arguably more scope on the inside for fitting some of the toys we are working on.
On that subject, btw, one of our guys bought in an OBD2 data logger and strapped a Bluetooth board on the back of it. Plugged straight into the Volvo, the Passat and his Prius and instantly reported all the fault codes (none on the Volvo thankfully), real time rpms, speed, engine load, throttle position etc to my laptop. Very slick and very cheap.
New L200 every time! I've heard all sorts of problems with navaras. Been having this discussion on another NG, the L200 seems to have won hands down. As someone who runs a Shogun as an everyday hack I can vouch for reliability, service and build of mitsubishi.
I like to think that when I buy British stuff that it keeps the country ticking over and keeps some UK industry going. In ten years you probably won't have an option :-(
Some things you just can't look at that way but I like 110s, the DC is a sensible piece of kit. I'd be happy to do 30K a year in one - the TD5 does fine at legal speeds (good for keeping the license!).
Although all the Surf's I've looked at appear to have saggy rear ends, even if the later 3.0 diesels aren't the disaster the old ones were. No good for towing by the looks of them, so I'm left with looking at older (3.1tdi) Izusu trooper (Bighorn). I'd like a 110 with the 3.1 engine in it....
On or around Thu, 16 Mar 2006 07:56:01 +0000 (UTC), Simon Isaacs enlightened us thusly:
mind, they run that up to 137 kraut-horses, with torque overboost. Although if it follows in the fine old LR tradition it'll have abvout 100 BHP and be as flat as a fart.
why TF do LR so persistently underpower their vehicles?
On or around Thu, 16 Mar 2006 19:11:36 +0000, "Paul S. Brown" enlightened us thusly:
heh. could have a point there.
but John Jones the Farmer doesn't want to have to fart about, he wants something that works out of the box. If Dai Davies down the road has a nissan and says hey this is great, lugs my sheep trailer far better than the landy ever did, then JJ is going to go an buy one. increasingly few LRs around this area and a lot more Jap double-cabs.
Landrover lost this market in Australia and most of the rest of the world to the Japanese over twenty years ago. Mainly due to better dealer network, price and comfort, to some extent power and quality control. Landrover, by concentrating on luxury cars has sent a clear signal they don't want this market. There is a rumour here that they are about to close all dealers outside of the state capitals, which shows just how much they want this market. (How would you be if your ECU needs resetting 1000km from the nearest dealer?) JD
They pretty much did that here - a whole raft of dealers who could not/ would not stump around £1 million to have their premises tarted up to look like a glorified hairdressing salon lost their franchises, the net result being that those most likley to want one have to travel into a city (or large town) to get one, and even worse, to get it serviced (and be given a Nissan Micra coutesey car!).
Having said that though, the double cab trend is doing a Dihatusu round here - everyone dumps LR in favour of the latest trend, then come back to LR (were talking Defender *users* here, not the Life Style bridage).
It seems to very much depend on the individual dealers though - round here Defender sales (and the follow-on sales from the rest of the range) are *very* strong again after a bit of a pasue while the first Td5's were "tested") - personaly I believe that has a lot to do with having two big dealerships within the same distance from the user base, i.e. competition. You have a hell of a job getting a second hand Defender at all, and it's been that way for some time now - indeed a half decent early 90 is fetching around £1000 more than the same vehicle would have 3 years ago.
Yes - but you live in a country you can drive across in a morning! So even so, you are never very far from a dealer. Hard finding a second hand Defender here, mainly because they are so rare to start with. I get this state's main "farming" paper, the Land, which is a weekly. They have a large classified advertising section, with a section for four wheel drives. Without doing an actual count, I would say that probably only every second or third issue has any Landrover at all advertised, and probably only three or four times a year is there a Defender (or Series) advertised. This from a situation forty years ago where there was nothing else except Landrovers. Even thirty years ago they were common. Although I live in a farming area, I can't think of anyone else within fifty kilometres that has any Landrover. Mostly it is a question of whether they have a Toyota or Nissan, with some Daihatsus, Mitsubishis, Mazda, Suzuki, Ford, Holden etc. Even Tata and Kia four wheel drives are more common than Landrovers. JD
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