First off, let’s get this gurt big elephant out of the room: the vehicle tax on this week’s shed is in the dreaded ‘M’ band, ie £735 a year. For the benefit of the two of you who are still reading, what in tarnation could be taking this otherwise inoffensive-looking Freelander into what has become the most offensive area of modern shed motoring? Obviously it’s the engine. We’ll look at that in a minute.
Registered in December 2006, this is one of the first gen-two Freelanders. You’ll find plenty of Freelander 2s in the classifieds, most of them high-mileage (typically 150k or more) TD4 2.2 diesels, but 3.2 petrols like this one are very rare indeed. It’s hard to be accurate about actual numbers as the website that’s supposed to tell you how many are left doesn’t aggregate fragmentary stats into useful results, but Shed’s guess is that the number will be smaller than fifty, and possibly quite a lot smaller than that too.
The 3.2-litre inline-six took over from the 2.5 V6 used in the Freelander 1. Technically it was a Ford engine but most of the development was done by Volvo under the B6324S designation for use in cars like the XC60, XC90, V70, XC70 and S80. Land Rover fettled it for insertion into its Freelander, giving it additional protection against attack by grit, mud and all the other nasty stuff that the vast majority of Freelander owners wouldn’t be going anywhere near. Still, it was nice to have that along with LR’s other improvements to the internal (you hoped) oil flows to help it manage those crazy off-road angles that the vast majority of Freelander owners wouldn’t be going anywhere near.
These engines sounded surprisingly good if you held onto the gears and would go on doing that for a long time too as long as they were decently serviced. Shed reckons they were easier and therefore cheaper to look after than the diesels. As a bonus feature you had at least two sources of spares to draw on, ie Volvo and LR. Timely servicing was a good plan for the rest of the F2’s mechanicals too, like the Haldex, rear diff, power steering, aircon clutch (compressors could seize), aux belt (that could snap before the recommended 105k change schedule) and water pump.
Then there was the six-speed Aisin gearbox. Clearly, it’s no twin-clutcher, this is nearly 20 years ago remember, but it worked smoothly enough and the F2 3.2 demographic was more interested in luxury than lunge anyway. Just as well too because with this drivetrain fitted the Freelander weighed 1,770kg, so even with 230hp at a distant 6,300rpm and 233lb ft at 3,200rpm the performance was fairly leisurely – 0-62 in 8.9 seconds and a top whack of 124mph. The combined fuel consumption figure wasn’t great either at 25mpg.
One well-known UK motoring mag said they quite liked the i6 but then went on to say it was too thirsty and too pricey to make it a great choice. They also said that the steering was too twitchy, not so much in corners where it performed well but, oddly, in a straight line which, allied to damper settings designed to work better off-road than on it, made it a nervy motorway proposition. Then they said it was a bit small on the inside.
Having said all that, the few people who have actually owned i6s rather than driven them in the Midlands for a couple of hours seem to have really liked them. Most of them were in HSE spec, so you got a lot of kit including leather upholstery, electric seats, Logic 7 14-speaker audio, xenon lights, park distance control, sat nav that didn’t always work that well and, according to the vendor anyway, not one but two sorts of wood, laurel and eucalyptus.
Shed struggles to see wood these days, so he apologises if he’s missing something here but he can only see one species. He’s hoping it’s eucalyptus because whenever he is selling someone a car with eucalyptus in it he tells the buyer that it eases the throat in the event of a cold. All you had to do was squirt a little warm liquid onto it to activate the soothing vapours. If any buyer seemed to be impressed by this holistic sustainability news he would then go on to try and sell them some vegan ice from his workshop fridge.
Ten years ago you would have been paying about £7,000 for this car. Today this 115,000-miler is just £1,450. The VED hurts it, but what you lose on tax you might gain on maintenance costs because last month’s MOT has left it with just one advisory for play in a front ARB ball joint. Unfortunately Shed used up all his BJ jokes a couple of weeks ago so you’ll have to stick your own one in here.
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