Please don’t keep on about the merits of a 4 x 4 because we don’t want John G4YSS to purchase one. His winter activations make such riveting reading, not only for the walk and activation but for the drive to and from the car parking spots. I for one would miss these adventurous reports.
73
Nick G4OOE
Hi All you have eventually dragged me in to this 4x4.I have run Land Rovers on and off all my life.The reason that farmers prefer the short wheelbase is that it is more manouverable in tight places with a trailor on.I have gone up Ingleborough via Crina Bottom with a 1952 series 1 So there is the challenge for your foreign junk.I still have a new Defender and love it to bits.It has the 2.2 Ford Transit engine and six speed gearbox my road tax is just over £200 so its news to me that it is going up a pile.I didn’t think it was emissions that it was being discontinued for .It was sideways crash impact and not fitted with airbags.They started making them in 1948 and there is still 2 thirds still on the road.For my money its a grave mistake to stop making them Geoff G6MZX
The strange thing is the reason everyone is saddened at the end of the Defender is because in all those years it hasn’t changed much. If you ignore the interior trim and body shells, the vehicle is a chassis, transmission and engine. The transmissions and engines have changed a lot in recent years but the body styling is such that you can see the original Land Rover in the latest Defender. You can see the 1948 design still in a 2015 vehicle.
That’s the problem, any new body shape will be difficult to accept irrespective of whether it works off-road, on-road and all points between. You can say there’s no point changing the body if it works and the construction method allowed a myriad of body options. But if the body had changed every 5-7 years so that the original Land Rover looked very much a 1948 design and the 2015 verison looked “modern”, nobody would care that it was being replaced. It’s the fact it hardly ever changed is bothering people.
The article I read said LR is considering a unitary aluminium body for strength and passenger protection with an aluminium chassis. Sound pricey already. The article I read said 3 body styles would be needed including high spec trim and lower spec trim for commercial/industrial use. The good news is the other models sell so well there’s cash available to fund the redesign and engineering. So the old management never had or wouldn’t spend.
All-aluminum might not be that expensive. The new Ford F150 pickup is an aluminum body on a steel frame and starts at $25,000. Of course, Ford makes a LOT of those trucks so they can fund the engineering.
I have a Freelander 2 and I love it. I have not put it to too much mud and plug stuff but there are plenty of Vids online! I tend to use a series 3 landrover with a load of military Clansman stuff for the radio work, a little cool in winter but the heater works OK.
robin GØGNE
I have SOTA friends that use Subaru, Land Rover and Vauxhall 4 x 4s and I use a Kia 4 x 4 and they all seem to do the job very well, so it is all down to a matter of personal taste within an individual’s budget.
73
Nick G4OOE
Your Kia will have sensible tyres and would have been able to move in today’s snow using its normal 100% torque to the front wheels without automatically sending any torque to the rear wheels. Which is in contrast to the Range Rover Vogue with 20in alloys and the super low profile tyres which was having difficulty starting off on the level in 3in of compacted snow.
Nothing wrong with the RR or its 4wd system… all 4 wheels were turning. The problem was the tyres had no grip in the snow. My mates FWD A4 estate has 2 winter tyres on the front and summer tyres on the rear. It had no problems on the same road. He mentioned the Range Rover getting nowhere fast. Wrong tyres.
It’s the tyres that do the work.
Yes, but that does not mean that winter tyres are mandatory for driving in poor conditions. On the face of it my Audi Quattro with 55 series standard summer tyres should be undriveable in many of the conditions that I have encountered, but I have managed to get where I wanted to go. 7 miles each way on ice en route to Fair Snape Fell G/SP-007 and 4 miles each way on compacted snow en route to Fountains Fell G/NP-017 to recall just two occasions. When there’s a will, there’s a way.
73, Gerald G4OIG
55 isn’t low profile, same as Sarah’s 1.4 Punto.
This is a low profile: (that’s a £2 coin for scale)
4WD - Just my own thoughts:
Firstly to Nick - G4OOE: I hope I don’t have any more like that this year! Glad it caused a chuckle though. HI. Congrats on ‘free man’ status! Hpe TW goes well. 73, John.
General Reply:
This makes interesting reading so I thought I’d better have my two penneth though I have only owned two Land Rovers; one LWB Safari & one SWB and that was over a period of 12 years in ‘ancient times.’ A great discussion here and I enjoyed reading everyone’s differing views. It has rekindled a former interest in 4WD vehicles, especially old LR’s.
I would suggest that the problem really boils down to how often do you NEED a 4WD in urban or even rural Britain, especially England. The word isn’t ‘want’ but ‘need.’ In percentage terms of all the miles driven I found that it was an almost undetectable fraction of 1%. That isn’t to say that if you happen to have a 4WD you won’t find ways of using it. Yes, many times I went out looking for it and boy I had a lot of fun but I can only remember once when 4WD was absolutely essential in getting the family home.
This was an occasion in the early 1980’s - Newcastle to Scarborough via Whitby. It was night time, in a blizzard/ semi white out with a lot of snow on the road. The journey down the A1 had been bad enough and Sutton Bank was closed but the police were only allowing 4WD’s to attempt the hill out of Guisborough onto the Whitby Moors. We had to weave around stopped vehicles at all angles on a steep hill without much visibility either. I was grateful to the Rover Company that night.
We are still stuck with the extra weight and transmission power absorption of 4WD’s but engine efficiencies have improved a lot. In 1980 I could expect 17mpg overall; 21mpg on a run and 9 to 11mpg for the XYL shopping around town. That’s with a Fairy overdrive too. It had 2 x 10.7 gallon petrol tanks so you needed a re-mortgage to fill it up. Nevertheless, we drove it 4,000 miles to Sorrento & back in 1978.
After working for 60 hours to swap the 2,286cc petrol for a 2.2 BMC Diesel, we got about 23mpg overall and 28mpg max on a run. The conclusion I came to after 12 years was that I could have 4WD or be somewhat more affluent. Now the situation is much improved. Modern 4WD’s use less fuel and they actually have seats that don’t kill your coccyx. Some even have suspension that you can notice but when all said and done the overall costs are significantly greater especially when my record shows that I have driven 66,000 miles just doing SOTA’s since 2002. All things considered I am quite proud of that actively managed ‘low’ figure but what would the 4WD cost premium have added up to by now I wonder?
Last December I regretted not having 4WD and would never rule it out but cost versus usefulness has to be considered. Sometimes it boils down to five minutes on one hill in two years.
As for the differences? Some thoughts. ‘4WD’ is 2WD and an ordinary car is really 1WD. If you don’t believe me try running it in gear with the driven axle jacked off the ground. You can stop one wheel with your boot. That problem can be overcome with diff-locks, limited slip or individual wheel braking - all expensive but available if you want them. There are three main states a road-wheel can be in besides stopped. 1) ‘Dragging’ (ie not driven). 2) ‘Neutral’ (a theoretical situation as if it doesn’t exist. 3) ‘helping’ (driven). The difference between 1 and 3 is substantial making the switch over to 4WD seem like magic. More than twice as good as 2WD. Add diff locking and the magic wand is waved still more.
It has been said that tyres are a big factor. It’s quite true and when I had a Landie we were on cross plies with treads so chunky that you could hear the howl half a mile away on smooth tarmac on a still night. However 10,000 miles or less was all you could get out of them. Narrow tyres can be better in snow. Ground clearance combined with wheelbase can be critical too but even the off-road radials tend to be lower profile nowadays.
There’s lots more I could say but one final thought. Even 4WD fails us sometimes (see pic) so it’s knowing how much you can push the envelope. Despite the above; would I love to have my old Series-2A SWB Airportable Landie back again? Not half! Right now I really envy you Four Wheel Drivers.
Photos: My Series-2A Airportable Land Rover (EX-MOD 1969).
Photo-1: After repaint in 1978.
Photo-2: 4WD ‘Defeated’ in Irton Moor Lane, Scarborough just half a mile from home on 15 March 1979.
Photo-1
Photo-2
Agree entirely Andy. The 55’s are very much a compromise between comfort and road holding which suits me fine. With those on, the car will never perform optimally in any respect, but it ticks enough boxes in every category as far as I am concerned and allows me to go where I want to pretty much when I want to… unless the road is blocked by some dipstick who has taken his “performance” motor out in the snow.
As for the original question - 4x4 or not. I would say yes in whatever form you can get it. It has certainly helped Paul and I survive a blow-out caused by metal debris on the motorway and a trip to the hedge bottom. I think we’d have been in serious trouble without it. I don’t intend going back to 2WD any time soon.