L322 Range Rover: why owners love them, warts and all

A couple of years back, a rather strange event occurred at a secondhand car dealer visited by your reporter. 

It was somewhere near Derby, I think, and the garage specialised in big four-wheel-drives of the Mercedes ML, Porsche Cayenne and Range Rover variety. Particularly Range Rovers, and it was one of these that my wife had taken a fancy to. It was an early L322-series Range Rover, the third-generation version conceived when BMW owned Land Rover. She wanted something practical that could carry a decent load, something that would plough through snow and something with a sumptuous interior.

True, we didn’t need a big five-seater, we didn’t need a vehicle that could follow a ski lift and we didn’t need one that would struggle to break 35mpg on diesel. But there’s something beguiling about the Range Rover’s quietly imperious demeanour, its throne-like front seats and, by the time you’re looking at one a decade old, as we were back then, its rather striking value. So we went to Derby to see a black HSE for around £8000, this a far smaller number than the one appearing on its odometer.

As so often with a vehicle transitioning from the pre-owned era of its life to the very much used, this one had a disappointingly shiny leather front seat, an even shinier steering wheel, evidence of an indeterminate spillage on the lower half of its tailgate carpet and a few small-scale rearrangements of its flanks. But the paint was still shiny, and sitting inside, it was still special. 

We spoke to the salesman. “Is it a Range Rover that you particularly want?” he said. It was, we said, slightly surprised. “It’s just that you really need to want one of these, because they are sometimes challenging to own. You have to be prepared for some problems. But if you really want one and know that, then you’ll be okay.”

We could hardly believe it. Here was a salesman hinting pretty strongly that buying this Range Rover might not be such a brilliant idea. And it wasn’t as though we were likely to regularly come banging on his door if we bought it and there were breakdowns, because the door in question would be a good 150 miles away. Still, we took the test drive despite a rising tide of doubt. Doubt that drowned our desire to buy this car, or any other from his tight-packed warehouse selection.

That was a few years back. More recently I met a photographer who had bought an L322 Range Rover of similar vintage. “Has it been reliable? I asked, kind of knowing the answer. “Yes, but there’ve been some issues, mostly electrical,” he said. “The other day, I turned on the lights and the door mirrors power-folded. And I had to replace all the suspension airbags, although I knew that when I bought it. It was cheap.” So is he going to sell it? “No. I like it too much.”