United Kingdom-Land Rover Discovery.
The new Land Rover Discovery arrived at my house smelling of fresh leather and recently treated plastics - the unmistakable (and all too soon lost) scent of new car, a compound aroma deemed so appealing in some quarters that many people would happily bottle it in liquid form and use it as room spray, or possibly even as an intimate little eau de cologne. ("Mmm, what’s that you’re wearing?" "It’s Vauxhall Insignia." "Delicious!")
Rising from the Discovery, though, that intoxicating showroom tang seemed completely wrong. This, after all, is the most openly rural, fundamentally agricultural 4x4 known to man, a car built specifically to go from A to B via C, where A is Cheltenham, B is Shepton Mallet and C is a flooded paddock known to contain some large, pointy stones. Indeed, it’s hard to think how the Discovery could suggest Gloucestershire more emphatically without actually being Zara Phillips.
Accordingly, throw open one of its chunky and virtually bomb-proof doors and your nose should be instantly assaulted by the smell of wet Labrador and spent gun cartridges, and with a faint but persistent top note of drunk Young Farmer. Discarded wellingtons and dogs you didn’t even know you owned should be sliding from side to side in the boot-space at all times. And, obviously, it should be caked to its windows in claggy loam and, perhaps, bits of things that people have recently shot or, at the very least, run over. Frankly, you shouldn’t have to garage it at night. You should stick a blanket on it and turn it loose in a field.
On top of which, the Discovery remains, of course, a superlative piece of engineering, peerlessly capable, based on years of fastidious and gifted research and development, a masterpiece of its seven-seat kind. Yet it won’t have escaped your notice that Land Rover is having a hard time flogging Discoveries. Indeed, rumour has it that the last time it managed to sell one of these at full price, it was horse-drawn.
That’s partly the company’s own fault, of course, for making the thing so solid. (Unless you genuinely are involved in an unusual number of cliff-top rescue scenarios, a Land Rover is, like a wet Labrador, for life, if you want it to be.) But it’s also down to increasing levels of scorn for the notion that the Discovery represents in any sensible way a suitable town car. (Fighting back, Land Rover promises to offset on your behalf the carbon emissions pumped out by your first 45,000 miles of Discovery-based motoring - a smart move, but unlikely on its own to remove the car’s stigma.) Still, it’s all very well telling farmers that they should trade in their Discoveries for something more economical, but you try recovering a stray sheep in a Nissan Micra. Sure, you’ll use less petrol and generate less carbon dioxide, but you will also leave a trail of body panels and suspension springs across the grass and be left holding a steering wheel and a door handle. And then you’ll have to replace the Micra, not to mention the sheep, and suddenly the environmental arguments won’t be looking so watertight.
Clearly, I should have put my Discovery through its paces and roughed it up a bit. I should have gone off straight away and found a ditch to drive it into. Then I should have accelerated it into a river before forcing it up a sandbank in fourth. And then I should have taken it down to the sea and obliged it to paddle at depths of up to four feet, before finally driving it head-on into a stationary cow to see which of us came off worse.
I didn’t, though. I took my kids to school in it and then I parked it at Sainsbury’s, where the disapproving scowl on the face of the woman in the adjacent bay threatened to burn two layers off the paintwork.
So, I can at least report that, quite understandably, urban resistance to the Discovery glows as hot as ever. I can also speculate that the time between taking delivery of a new Discovery in a city context and discovering that someone with a grudge has keyed it the length of the passenger side may, in some built-up areas, have to be calculated in seconds.
By all means buy a Discovery, though - especially now, when doing so will help out a troubled marque, while simultaneously nurturing the green shoots of recovery in the economy as a whole. But remember that it’s a bit like buying a horse: in fairness, you’ll need a field and a country lifestyle to go with it, and, if you don’t have one already, that could get expensive.
Top speed: 112mph
Range: 0-62 in 11.7 seconds
Average consumption: 27.7mpg
CO2 emissions: 270g/km
Eco rating: 3/10
At the wheel: Prince Harry’s mate
On the hi-fi: Simply Red
In the glovebox: Winalot
Bound for: Burghley
Buy it because: You have sheep
Rating: 9/10
Price: from £29,322
Times on line.
