Motoring: Faithful servant

And so to my 72nd car (71st if you don’t count the horsebox).

And so to my 72nd car (71st if you don’t count the horsebox). Oppressive financial responsibility has slowed the recent rate of change and I’ve had my 1999 old-shape Discovery 2 for an unprecedented eight-plus years, although one or two others were run in harness with it during that time.

It has been a good and faithful servant. Purchased from main dealer Caffyns in 2002 for £17,000 (minus £3,000 for my trade-in Range Rover) at 37,000 miles, it needed expensive warranty work on the gearbox and ECUs (electronic black boxes) in the first year. Since then virtually nothing has gone wrong. After 121,000 miles it’s still on its original clutch, exhaust, injectors and battery. It consumed the usual consumables, of course — brake pads, wiper blades, shock absorbers — and the front coil springs had to be replaced, at about £100 each, probably because of the road-canyons — colloquially known as potwholes — around here.