Motoring
Happiness is muddiness
Alan Judd
Ienjoy the elements, and so on a blustery afternoon of squall and tempest I set out with dog, stick and Land-Rover Defender to a hilly wooded region and there plunged into the mire. We emerged in the dusk a couple of hours later, satisfactorily drenched and muddy, and stumbled and slithered to where the Defender waited obediently. With a practised flick of the wrist, I flung all-but-drowned dog into the back — pausing only to check that it was the animal I'd set out with — clambered into the cockpit, fired up, engaged reverse and set off forward.
Stop, check, re-engage reverse, forward. It had not been a very alcoholic New Year, nor was I sitting in some mischievous sub- stitute for my Defender. I went carefully through the gears again. Fifth and reverse had gone AWOL together, first appeared to be fourth and second and third swapped places with promiscuous abandon. I set course for a slow circular route home, eventually docking with bow towards the nearest Land-Rover specialist.
This Defender was born in 1996 and had achieved 20,500 miles. Her predecessor in the stable, a 1990 Isuzu Trooper with 67,000 miles on the clock, never had a problem. I like Defenders but, not for the first time, I questioned the change.
Isuzu=Subaru and they are the largest truck makers in the world, turning out all manner of vehicles since 1916 and recently winning world rally championships, being voted 4WD of the year and so on. I sam- pled them again just before Christmas, when I was lent the new Subaru Forester for a week. Subaru made their rural repu- tation in the 1980s with a series of reason- ably priced, ruggedly reliable 4WD estates and pick-ups which had a high and low ratio gearbox beloved by farmers, foresters, vets and the horsey crowd. Gradually, how- ever, they made them more sophisticated and expensive, lowered the suspension to increase road performance and so lost the working part of their market. The Forester, a roomy 4WD estate priced at either £16,400 or £18,500 on the road, looks like an attempt to retrieve that part of the mar- ket. It deserves to do well, though there is a query.
First impressions from within are good visibility and a sense of space. The height means you can almost step in rather than contort yourself but its roof-line is low enough to avoid the body-roll on corners that you get with most 4WDs. Road man- ners are further enhanced by Subaru's rightly renowned 2-litre horizontally opposed flat-four engine, which lowers the centre of gravity. It likes hard slog, this engine, but it will still return 110 mph and drink the smelly stuff at between 24 and 36 mpg. The wide seats are comfortable and variously adjustable while there are enough storage pockets, cubby-holes and hiding places, including a place for fishing-rods, a glasses case and an under-floor bowl for muddy boots or live crabs to sustain you on long journeys, or to keep the children occu- pied for half a morning. The grey dash is uninspiring and merely functional.
The base model costs. £16,400 which, nonetheless, includes airbags, ABS and self-levelling, while £18,500 buys you air- conditioning, electric sunroof, front fog- lamps, wiper de-icer, heated front seats and mirrors and side air-bags. Automatic trans- mission is £1,000 extra in each case.
It's a taut yet relaxing drive, better han- dling and faster than you'd normally expect of this sort of vehicle, though I didn't par- ticularly like the fly-by-wire electronic throttle which seemed to decelerate frac- tionally after I had. I didn't have the chance to test it seriously off-road, but it should perform well enough compared with those it sees as its competitors, the Toyota RAV4 and the Honda CR-V. It should also see itself as competing with the new Land- Rover Freelander which it beats on price and pace and on having low-ratio gears, a great help when towing across rough coun- try or serious mud.
Ground clearance — along with tyres, the most serious cross-country determinant — is, however, more equivocal. The bumph gives it as 7'12 inches but a recent letter to Honest John's agony column in the excel- lent Daily Telegraph motoring section pointed out that the lowest point of the exhaust is actually only 53/4 inches above ground, a figure that Honest John's own measurement confirmed and which com- pares unfavourably with the Freelander. My measurement of the sill clearance important in ruts — showed a healthy 10 inches (the Defender is twice that).
None of this will matter to most drivers but it's still a pity because I believe the real market for the Forester isn't the SUV (sports utility vehicle) fashion sector it thinks it competes with, but the comfort- able, road-going, occasional workhorse needed by farmers, vets etc. It is not, any- way, a fashionable-looking vehicle; its lines are clean and purposeful rather than atten- tion-grabbing. Give it a whirl in the mud and see how you go.
Meanwhile the Defender problem turned out to be a grub screw at the rear of the main gear selector shaft. This cheap but essential item was fixed only with lock-tight and re-fixing it meant dropping the gearbox out. Apparently the grub screw at the front of the shaft — more easily got at— is that one that 'usually' works loose. The point is, there shouldn't be any 'usual' faults on `Personally, I'd wait until the epidemic hits Europe.' expensive, allegedly rugged vehicles like these, since as faults are noticed they should be corrected. The other point is that, had it been an Isuzu or Subaru, it would have been covered by the three-year/ 60,000-mile warranty that Land-Rover, for reasons we can only guess at, don't give.
Previous page
