This is a hard blog for me to write as I have never driven a Range Rover in my life! I have been in a few and spoken to owners who love them and some that hate them. The lovers tend to be lovers of Land Rover not the Range Rover icon. The haters (and they have good reason to hate them,) bought them as an alternative to BMW/Audi/Mercedes.

Watching the roads these days, the place is littered with RR’s and mainly the new shape – their distinctive daytime running lights give them away (start looking out for them – you will be amazed!) I really don’t understand why there are so many as they aren’t cheap!

I mentioned earlier that the ‘haters’ have good reason and that good reason was the lack of reliability – the thing you want most from a car (especially ones at this price). One colleague managed about 800 miles in his new Sport in 6 months due to the Engine Management System putting the car into limp mode every time it was driven. It never did get fixed, was returned to the lease company and he opted for an X5 instead. A family friend who had a proper RR in black suffered catastrophic electrical failure at night on a busy motorway roundabout!

Bearing all this in mind and with a price tag that starts from £61,250 for a Sport, £73,950 for the original RR, and a whopping £104,150 for a RR Long Wheelbase, and let’s be fair, the spending won’t stop there: if you were buying a Range Rover you WOULD choose some options from the pages and pages available to you. For example: you have 17 combinations of wood and leather, 6 Interior Head Linings to choose from – 10 different sets of Alloy Wheels and this is all before 18 Exterior Body Colours and a further 9 choices of Roof Designs. A good option, which I like the thought of is Deployable Side Steps, where the side steps appear from the underside of the car automatically when the doors are opened or the key fob pressed to gain easier access into the car but the £3,177.73 price tag is verging on the side of ridiculous. The most bizarre option I have found is Illuminated RR Kick Plates for each door sill – a must at a mere £774.52!

The main contenders available in this sector and up against the RR are the BMW X5, Porsche Cayenne, Audi Q7 and Mercedes ML, all very good cars with more spec as standard, nicer to drive, cheaper to run and better value for money than a RR.

So you might be thinking that I’m writing a bad blog about the RR. Certainly not. I have a thing about them, I would actually drive one even though they are a silly price to buy, stupidly expensive to maintain and they aren’t going to be cheap on fuel or give you the drive of your life. Added to the fact that they will certainly let you down at some point, I can see that this thing I have about RR is going to cost me a lot of money one day!

Perhaps I need to drive one to get this obsession out of my system – I don’t actually know anyone who does have a new one or works for them. One of my closest friends does work for JLR (Jaguar/Land Rover) but the last time I saw him he was concentrating on the all new Electric/Hybrid one so driving his wouldn’t really help matters. Added to the fact that it was filled with all the electrical and diagnostic equipment from the whole JLR development building, probably making its value more than Tesco’s monthly wage bill!!

So what the hell am I going to do, I want to know what the fascination is all about with these cars and I really want to know why stars such as Kate Moss, Daniel Craig, Angelia Jolie, Jennifer Aniston, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Lopez and Bruce Springsteen (the list goes on and on but you get my point) own or have owned one.

I suppose the easiest option to me would be to go and work for Land Rover and looking at the list of celebs above it could be a win-win situation, especially looking at how many are hot, rich, famous females 😉

My point is that as much as they are iconic in every way, if I had the sort of money to buy one… I wouldn’t! (I would be a Car Salesman’s worse nightmare as I would tip up at my local Dealership to Test Drive – I’m hating myself for saying that!) An Aston Martin, a Lamborghini or even a Ferrari would top my list above the RR. Spending that sort of money on a car means you have enough money not to worry about little things like cost of running, depreciation and if it does break and let you down the answer will normally be ‘buy another’ but these people who have RR’s tend to have more cars than days of the week! And I’m not talking Fiats and Renaults either!

So I will have to resign myself to the fact I will never own a RR, but (and let’s see how good my blogs are!) if there is anyone reading this from LRUK or any kind Dealership out there that would like to lend me one for a week or so (I will head to France in it) then I am here and willing to do a proper road test for you.