My Compliments To 130CC
You must be an Archivist, or posses an uncanny sence of recall. The Lenghtly diatribe in the press regarding the Explorer vs Firestone really never served much to deffinitively prove either were to blame. What did come from it was an near bankrupting recall of a tire which proved to have a severe manufacturing flaw. Testing by the NHTS and Institute For Highway safety found a nearly identical propensity for tire failure on vehicles other than Explorers, as well as a disturbing propensity for All SUVs to rollover, due to their inherent high CG. You must be aware of the much more recent press regarding SUVs, not just the three year old stuff.
What I was initially responding to was Trevors comment about FORD "closing" LR plants when, in actual fact, they did not ever say they would close anything, but to 'no longer fund' them, ( A decision that BMW had also made prior to Ford picking them up. One could only guess where LR would be, had Ford not done so. Had Ford simply wanted to aquire the name, it would have been disasterous, as quality, at the time they acquired them was far worse than it is now.
While I agree with both 130CC and Trevor about Defenders, and their simplicity being an attribute we LR people would lve to see continued, While the Defender embodies all the charisma and ruggedness we all associate with the name Land Rover, It still embodies all the quirks, weaknesses, and failings of the series trucks, noise, lack of comfort, leaks and rust to mention a few. I love my 110 for all the character it has, though I've probably spent enough on it, keeping it up, as only a hobbyist would, to buy a fourth Explorer. I had three, simply because they were comfortable, capable in extreme winters, as we get in New England, and they simply never broke. I never once said to myself "Gee, what a fun car", but now that I'm retired, don't depend on the reliability, and can afford to divulge myself in fun, forgoing reliability. I can always resort to my FORD F-250 when LR reliability ( all too frequently) vacations. We happen to be a three Land Rover family (six if you count the unregistered projects)
Land Rover needs to have reapeat customers if it is to survive in the US, and frankly, we don't care who gets LR into a 21st century manufacturing mentality
Oh, yeah, Jags. My mother drove them for 25 years. She always had the Taurus (Ford) to depend on when he XJ was in the shop. They sure don't build them like they uded to (before Premier Auto Group) In fact, now sell 5 times the numbers they used to. I guess we can blame Ford for that too.
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