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Lovert Mafukure
I recently bumped into a detailed overview of a Landrover Free-lander. It was too interesting for me not to share it with you.
The summary was just blunt and straight to the point, ‘the free-lander is possibly the most incompetently designed and built 4×4 in history’. Sounds a little too harsh but let’s dig a bit into the evidence.
According to this review, the reliability is appalling, the safety standard is dodgy and overally it’s a good car to avoid at all costs.
They claim the Free-lander was released into the market for the first time in 1997 with 132 serious faults which were known to Land-rover management. ‘In the author’s words, ’ for producing one of the most incompetently designed and built cars, Landrover was rewarded with record sales as the free-Lander was the best selling 4×4 in Europe between 1997 and 2002’. I believe the Brits just believe in what has been developed by their own no-matter how bad the technology is.
The free-lander came in two trims, the 4door and the 2 door. The 2 door had options of a foldable canvas roof or a detachable hard top.
The four-door isn’t bad looking. Big plastic bumpers define the front with plastic cladding complementing the wheel arches. It can easily score a 7 out of 10 on the looks.
The 2 door on the other hand came short of design intelligence and looks like an enlarged Suzuki vitara for the executive’s son in Junior High school.
The free-lander came with 4 engine options. A 1.8L petrol, a 2.5L V6 Petrol, A 2L Rover diesel engine and another 2L BMW sourced diesel engine. The diesels are not very common here in ZIm but they were the better of the bunch. A lot of them petrol engines are stuck in garages with numerous problems, which we will get into shortly.
According to Dog & Lemon review, the free-lander petrol engines were designed by Satan and assembled by monkeys. None of them ever made it to 50 000km without needing attention especially on the head gaskets that blew almost always with some as early as 10 000km. The diesels were the best of the bunch though they were a very long way from perfect. They leaked oil, the blew turbochargers which are still very expensive to replace.
The petrol engines have head gasket and overheating issues. This problem is mainly because these were designed by satan and assembled by monkeys as said earlier.
The aluminium block and steel sleeve combination has proven the fact. As they are different metals, they expand and contract at different rates and eventually affect head gaskets and eventually overheating…the rest as they say is history.
The timing belts on the petrol engine have to be changed at 115000km together with the water water-pump and tensioners. The funny thing about it all is these engines never reach that mileage without needing some work done on them.
Since most of them are from the Uk, you will find a lot of them coming with 5 speed manual transmissions. They are known to have clutch problems and usually it’s the clutch master and slave cylinders, which are oddly made of cheap plastic.
They are not meant to last for long. It gets one to think that they made them that way so you can always go back knocking at their door looking for spares. Since they are also 4×4 the transfer case usually gives issues.
An automatic option is available commonly found on the V6 model but its also prone to premature failure. Jatco, the same company that makes Mazda’s notorious automatic transmissions, makes the automatic transmission. Problems vary from gear slippage, delay in shifting and jerking between gear changes. Eventually they become good clients for the junkyard.
The drive isn’t that great, these car are at home offroad or in the mud. On the open road they have too much body roll because of their height. The sitting position doesn’t make it any better, the seats are positioned so high that if you are on the taller side of life, you better watch the bumps and your head.
With that said there are a lot of issues to be expected from the freelander including the facelift. The facelift had some improvements on the old parts which only meant the prolonged the surfacing of the same problems which would ultimately come. Air-conditioner failure is common with the heater also suffering the same fate. When the heater stops working they say it points to a possible head gasket problem. Most of these wagons have sunroofs and tailgates with roll down windows common here on the Toyota Surfs we know from yesteryear.
These have a tendency of leaking and need attention every so often.
Rust is common on the undercarriage as most of these come from the UK. Rust is something to be worried about as the undercarriage and suspension parts will be rusting away. Other owners are a bit careful when it comes to rust prevention while other don’t really care much.
So there you have it, perhaps the best 4×4 landrover is still the defender by far!-@lovert116
Source:-Dog & Lemon
Automart Used Spares Centre – Quality Used Japanese Spares, +263 772 33 99 38 – [email protected]. Facebook: @automartusc
derick.khumalo