Used Car Review: Age Of Discovery

Land Rover's broken reputation should provide cheap off-road motoring - the mechanical gods willing,writes David Morley.Poor old Land Rover. When it comes to setting yourself up as the butt of unflattering jokes, the British brand is the master.

The biggest guffaws usually come when mention is made of Land Rover reliability (or, more specifically, the scarcity of it) and we've all heard the old favourites.
The real tragedy, though, is that there's no smoke without fire, and Land Rovers of old were prone to falling apart, exploding in a shower of sparks or simply failing to proceed in a variety of spectacular ways.
Most mechanics who deal in fixing these quirks have a wing of their house devoted to the Land Rover and its foibles.
It's this litany of mechanical mayhem that has caused one of the more recent Land Rovers, the Discovery, to be such a red-hot bargain right now.
Combine the mechanical maladies with the thirst of its petrol V8 engine, and it's suddenly difficult to even give a Discovery away.
The turbo-diesel versions are a different story, but an early to mid-1990s Discovery V8 petrol is a tough thing to unload these days.

The flip side is that if you're looking for an off-roader at a bargain price, you could do a lot worse. OK, maybe only a bit worse, but an elderly Discovery is likely to have had some, if not all, of its bugs ironed out by now and is actually darned capable off-road. Provided it keeps running.
And since the Federal Government is now kicking in with the cost of LPG conversions, that fuel -guzzling V8 engine isn't necessarily the bogeyman it once was. While the LPG tank will eat up some space, we have seen them mounted below the car just behind the rear axle. And if you make the conversion a dual -fuel one, you've just doubled the Discovery's range.
Early Discoveries were powered by a 3.5-litre engine (it grew to 3.9litres in 1994) that used old-fashioned pushrods for simplicity.
But don't be fooled by the V8 layout, because the Discovery is hardly a powerful or fast vehicle.
What power it did produce was ably soaked up by the weight of the thing, its compromised aerodynamics and the extra drag of the four-wheel-drive system.
Speaking of which, like its more prestigious big brother, the Range Rover, the Discovery had constant allwheel-drive.

That gave it good grip on slimy surfaces (at the expense of some fuel economy) and when low-range was needed for rock-hopping, the driver could select that from inside as well as lock the centre differential for even more off-road smarts.
And that's really the Discovery's long suit because off-road it's pretty hard to stop, the mechanical gods willing.
Most Australian-delivered Discoveries were fitted with a four-speed automatic transmission that makes life easier in the city but makes the performance even more leisurely.
That said, the five-speed manual is much harder to find second-hand and makes an already big, tall vehicle feel even more imposing.
The Discovery's reputation for going bang, meanwhile, is the result of years of hard-earned ownership experience.
The engine is tough and long-lived, but eventually it will suffer from blown head gaskets and fairly terminal ills such as stretched timing chains. And if that happens, you might just find that the cost of repairs is way beyond the value of the whole vehicle.
The interior was also made of fly-apart plastic. Any early Discoveries still around will almost certainly sport very second-hand interior trim.
The electrics are also a problem. Many owners have reported serious electrical gremlins.
It's not unknown for Discoveries to jump out of low-range into neutral at crucial times off-road, too.
Assuming you've found a Discovery that looks clean and well maintained, the best advice is to give it a thorough, independent inspection and then haggle like crazy to get it as cheaply as possible. Even then, you'd want to have a serious off-road use in mind, but at these prices, getting away into the bush for the weekend has rarely been cheaper.

Which is great, provided you can stomach the uncertainty over whether you'll actually make it back.