Category: Large Executive 
Price Range: £46,045 to £75,695
Style, presence, tenacious off-road ability, fine on-road manners, cabin quality, robustness - and sense of well-being it engenders.
Fuel consumption, especially of V8, reliability questionmarks, fiddly air-conditioning.
The Range Rover is back on top as the most desirable - and pricey - off-roader.
It's a measure of the success of the first-generation Range Rover, and firm evidence of the relative failure of the second, that the ground-breaking 1970 original lived for 24 years and its follow-up has lasted just seven. The 1994 Range Rover never had the visual impact of the first car, and if it was undeniably better to drive, those gains were over-shadowed by its near-legendary unreliability. So when BMW took over Land Rover, it decided that facelifting the Mk 2 in 2000 and replacing it in 2007 - Land Rover's original plan - was not good enough for the world's most prestigious four-wheel drive. And so an all-new car was commissioned, the car that you see here. Although Land Rover is now owned by Ford, BMW finished the job it had started, delivering Ford a car which it always intended would be the best off-roader in the world - better, even, than its own X5.
Three years on and the Range Rover remains not only the world's most able off-roader, but an entirely credible luxury car too, a machine to tempt chairmen out of their BMW 7-Series and Mercedes S-Classes. And with the recent addition of Jaguar's excellent supercharged V8 to the line-up, Land Rover has answered criticisms that its flagship lacked power.
Latest Readers' Drives About the Land Rover Range Rover
wrote on 15 10 2006
wrote on 24 06 2006