If Milton had owned a Land Rover he’d never have vanquished Satan and his fallen angels to nether regions of rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shades of death.
If Milton had owned a Land Rover he’d never have vanquished Satan and his fallen angels to nether regions of rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shades of death. He’d have known that they could have had too much fun with the right wheels, as I did recently among the rocks, lakes, fens etc. of the 54,000 acre Roxburgh estate. Along with, I should add, 679 other motoring hacks, between 60 to 80 Land Rover staff and 80 vehicles.
Car launches vary from the exotic — Land Rover in Argentina, Bentley in Venice — to the domestic — Renault in the Stockholm suburbs, Citroën in Slough — but in choosing Walter Scott’s border country Land Rover scored a winner. Even after seven weeks of journalistic depredations, those green valleys and moorland tops remained beautiful and welcoming (as, even more creditably, did the excellent Roxburgh Hotel).
Extravagant, perhaps, given factory closures and the fact that both models are improved versions of what we’ve got already. But if you’ve spent millions on development you have to spend a bit on selling them, and in drawing attention to what you can do with these motors on anything from riverbeds to precipitous inclines to 0–100–0 on tarmac, Land Rover made a point that bears repetition: there’s nothing else quite like a Land Rover.
We were launching the new Discovery 4 and Range Rover Sport. In the five years since its birth the big box Discovery has proved highly popular, partly because it’s more reliable than its predecessor (the Highways Agency is only now auctioning its 175,000-milers).
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