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deep

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Everything posted by deep

  1. It's very unfortunate and misleading. The subtitles suggest the new car builds on the heritage of the others, when, in reality, it completely abandons every design feature of the old, bar the fact it has a four wheel drive system and possibly a Land Rover badge. I am generally positive about the new vehicle but hate bull droppings of this type! Not much ground clearance in this video either...
  2. Years ago, I worked for a government department which used a lot of 4WD vehicles. Vehicles were procured via a Government Stores Board contract. When Toyota got that contract, we were getting their cars so cheap that we could use them for a year or two, then get more than we paid when we sold them on. I believe the legal people weren't happy and things eventually changed but it was clear the advertising value was worth more to Toyota than the loss on each unit. Those weren't good years for the staff. Those Hi Luxes were truly awful off-road and the budget versions we drove were excruciatingly uncomfortable! The day they drowned my Hi Lux and replaced it with a Nissan was a very happy one.
  3. No real surprise and not a bad thing, considering what they did to the Range Rover and Discovery. It could have been very much worse. (It also could have been much better for many of us who grew to love a family of vehicles which spanned two thirds of a century. That family was laid to rest over three years ago, sigh.) The thing with the DC100 was that it was a cool-looking vehicle in its own right but it just wasn't a "proper" Land Rover. Now that we have accepted the demise of an ancient but useful construction technique, the DC100 concept (or similar) is the best we can hope for in the current environment.
  4. Someone is living in the past! No worries, it's generally a better place to be...
  5. They've done close to a million miles of testing, apparently. How much more would you like them to do before they actually put it on the market?
  6. Even slightly sticky is enough to make them pull. Easy enough to check by taking the wheel off and using a bit of flat steel to see if you can move the pads in smoothly. Obviously the side it pulls towards is the good side - check the other side, back and front. Remember to prod the brakes a few times afterwards before using them at speed!
  7. Aw, don't you enjoy the detective game? As I'm highly unlikely to buy one in the foreseeable future, I am thoroughly enjoying this process, probably more than I would enjoy the end result! Though, with a couple of camouflage-free piccies out there and some underbelly and interior shots as well, there is little left to guess in terms of styling. At least there are some pseudo off-road tyres on the latest one...
  8. Because, in the eyes of someone who lives in a glass office, this genuinely is a 21st Century Defender.
  9. Well, it might be a generic, over-complicated, modern "Land Rover" under the skin but, at least, the desire to sort-of look like a Defender has produced a cleaner and more European looking vehicle on the outside. I don't see it replacing my 110 but I do see how people would see it as desirable - especially given that laws, economics and the relentless desire of the modern consumer to be swamped in gadgets don't allow anything like an old-school Land Rover any more. Doesn't seem any doubt this photo is genuine.
  10. I enjoyed the little reference to Series Land Rovers with the red/yellow knobby lever on the dash. Less so some vulnerable pipework under the diff on the coil-sprung pics. Presumably that will get tidied up. I wonder if this thing is being designed to allow a centre front seat, at least in more enlightened markets? If they really do produce a coil-sprung option, that will make a few people very happy, enough that they might even buy one! I must say, I have enjoyed the last five years or so of speculation, particularly the detective work over the last year. I might even be a bit sad when the new Defender actually gets released and I'll have to read something different over breakfast...
  11. That actually looks more or less like a modern version of a proper Land Rover. Shock, horror, gasp etc.!
  12. That model is interesting. Looking at the bit in front of the doors, and taking on board that it has independent suspension, this could be a genuine facsimile. Great if they keep the round headlights, boo hiss if they can't get rid of the ugly bonnet bulge they stuck on Puma real Defenders.
  13. We probably have to blame the motoring press for the low profile road-biased tyres. Just about any review I've read/viewed in the last decade or more, from the non-specialist press (who often seem amazingly ignorant), has jumped on the Defender and other Land Rover vehicles, for not handling like their mums' hatchbacks. Any negative press will be perceived as loss of sales, so they are obliged to make the Defender that goes to the press very much a grippy, easy-handling road car. For the record, I find my 110 very easy to drive round town and on the open road. I just don't drive it like I drive my little car (couldn't anyway...). I have noted that the brake discs don't appear to fill the space in the rims completely, suggesting slightly saner rims, with thicker sidewall and better treaded tyres will be possible. Really, we're not seeing any sort of van or pickup truck at this stage, just station wagons (estate cars for the Northern Hemisphere folk). It's just not looking like a working vehicle. Yet! By the way, in that video Jamie-grieve posted, it looks pretty obvious that, had the vehicles been swapped around, the Range Rover would have been the one cruising past. Definitely more grip on that side.
  14. One of the places I work is a large native forest reserve, which has had an astounding amount of restorative work over the last decade and a half and now has a booming population of native wildlife. The windfarm people, somehow, got permission to put a lot of turbines in there (reeks of corruption but who can ever prove that?). Already, acres of bush has been bulldozed for access tracks and worse is to come. Some of the rare birds in there are known to be vulnerable to blade strikes. Who knows what effect the noise will have on other species? Even working around turbine noise is very unpleasant, not to mention the Nazi-like mentality to "safety". The spin put out the company is how environmentally friendly they are and how many electric cars they will be able to power... The fact is that electricity is not environmentally free - every means of production comes at a cost. The push to electric cars is driven as much by money as anything else and there is a lot of smoke and mirrors involved. The solution is for humanity to get less indulgent, to travel less and do in less wasteful ways but humanity doesn't want that. Especially not the money-is-power types who push "development" along, with the view that environmental responsibility or long-term vision are annoyances that lawyers have to overcome. Absolutely, there is a place for the electric vehicle (even an electric Defender) but it's equally not a case of fuel = bad and electric = good.
  15. In a vehicle specifically targeted at being used off road, as stated in the lion video, lots is better than very little. My work supplied Mitsubishi 4WD has far less travel than my 110 and you notice it, even on rutted tracks.
  16. I am surprised those dreadful ads made it all the way to Lanarkshire. I had thought they were New Zealand-only ads. They were clever, entertaining and highly misleading bits of advertising, which had New Zealanders believing the Hi Lux was a good vehicle to take off road (many still do). Of course, it was all poppycock. A friend of mine was involved in the making of one of them. They anchored a massive bulldozer at the top of a steep hill near Mangaweka and winched the Hi Lux up. Unlike in the famous Land Rover dam ad., they kept that winch cable hidden, which was highly misleading. At that time, we ran both Land Rovers and Hi Luxes at work and, frankly, the Hi Luxes were embarrassing off-road (not to mention cripplingly uncomfortable). Sadly, people with money in their wallets believed otherwise! P.S. - I have a fairly long beard (haven't shaved for nearly forty years), so am an expert in what longbeards want... We don't mind the pluses of modern technology at all but dislike the negatives. Those include complexity for the sake of it (endless gimmicks); expensive-to-repair and/or vulnerable bodywork and fittings; reliance on computers to get you there and home again and "style" at the expense of functionality. Land Rover have everything they need to create a vehicle this longbeard would start saving for but it won't happen. Obviously, my influence is tiny.
  17. A couple of neighbours and I extracted a large totara tree out of the riverbed last weekend (in two approx one ton sections). Chainsaws, Hi Lift, my Land Rover with its 13,500 lb winch and a neighbour's tractor. It was quite a job and a riverbed that managed to be both very soft and rocky didn't help. Neither did the strong current. After we finished, I remembered that the neighbour with the tractor drives a Disco 3. It never entered anyone's head that it would be a good idea to use that. Despite all the extra power, better water sealing and fancy electronics, you just know that the chance of breaking something expensive are too high to risk it. It was a sobering reflection! That's not to say that they won't put strong rims and excellent rock protection under the new Defender. I'm open to being surprised...
  18. Pounds per square inch is the standard measurement where I live, even though the country warmly welcomed the metric system decades ago. I haven't welcomed it yet though. Soulless and boring system. Now that landroversforever has enlightened me (thank you), I can see that the bar unit makes sense and is not boring. Note that tyre manufacturers still work in inches. And millimetres. At the same time...
  19. I'll have to look up how big a "bar" is but looks like around a third of road pressure, so ta for that. There's definitely a trade-off between unsprung weight and the flexibility of a deep sidewall. It's interesting how the Series Land Rovers in the background of the dune clip look to be going so well. Skinny tyres at low pressure plus a light vehicle all come together, as I know from experience. I enjoyed all those videos, thanks again.
  20. It did look like the D5 was a smidgeon further off the deck. Just out of curiosity, what sort of pressures can you get away with on those very low profile tyres?
  21. 1st video: 1) Nice to see it getting muddy. 2) Looked like you had fun. 3) This really is the new Land Rover. A line of expensive station wagons driving slowly over a carefully modified flat paddock. That makes me sad. 3rd video: 1) So, so much better! Good on you for tackling that. 2) That steering lock is impressive. 3) Defenders are still better (ducks for cover) but that Series One looked the most fun... 4) Love that South Africa market 2.8 six cylinder. Yum. 5) Great location!
  22. So, to summarise the last few pages: The first Land Rovers were quite basic and people who bought them fully expected to have to set points and tappets etc. and use grease nipples frequently. They weren't concerned if oil seeped out here and there and a few drips of water seeped in. The odd broken half shaft or gearbox which popped out of gear weren't surprising and easily dealt with. Move forward a few decades and points, tappets and grease nipples were no longer so important but otherwise little changed with the cars - but the owners were becoming far less tolerant. Move forward a little more and cost-cutting didn't help reliability. Further, there was now a second layer of complexity/unreliability imposed by electronics, with few remaining car owners having any tolerance for things going wrong, no matter how easy the fix. By this stage, the "opening" of the furthest reaches of the world, which Land Rovers had spearheaded, had near enough finished. The rough stuff had been largely replaced by formed tracks and pretty much any four-wheel drive would get there. The market for an ultra-basic, easy to fix utility vehicle had shrunk massively (and Land Rovers were no longer ultra-basic anyway). Not to mention the loss of a military market, which no longer accepted driving over land mines with no real occupant protection! There was more profit to be made by appeasing the prevalent hunger for toys, gizmos, gimmicks and bragging rights, which came about through the boredom of modern society, trapped in cities and dreaming of adventure rather than living it. So a vastly more complex Land Rover was born, which the handful of remaining purists are aghast at and the modern gimmick-lovers will mortgage their lives for. What have I missed?
  23. This is confusing. If this had been the Discovery 5 (instead of that odd thing that bears the name), it would have been pretty decent. But it's going to have a Defender badge instead. It's actually as much a Defender as a BMW Mini is a real Mini or a front-wheel-drive Beetle is a real Beetle. Just take the name and put it on an entirely different vehicle - and hope the name generates some sales! The new Mini and Beetle actually had appeal of their own, so weren't epic failures at all. Hopefully, the so-called "Defender" will do okay. At least the wheels look a bit bigger in the latest photos...
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