Steve Cropley
MONDAY
There isn’t a number big enough to cover the size of the group I’ve bored with tales of my latest car buying plan, which is to use a recent windfall to buy either an old-school gas-guzzler (Ford Ranger Raptor) or an interesting EV (Tesla Model 3 or optimised BMW i3s). However, there’s now another strand to the story. Since the latest Bicester Scramble, I’ve become increasingly obsessed with a healthy but unmolested 1973 two-door ‘suffix B’ Range Rover shown by Jaguar Land Rover Classic. The £55,000 price is terrifyingly high, but it’s also kind of understandable on the grounds of rarity.
Several decades ago, I owned one of these: a battered two-tone 1971 J-plater that would now be even rarer than this, had it not been scrapped a few years after I sold it. I have the fondest possible memories of that machine and can still feel my pride in its beautiful styling, huge presence, amazing visibility, unmatched versatility, surprising comfort, V8 heritage and all the rest. Next move, a trip to Coventry.
TUESDAY
As I pulled into a local EV charging station, it struck me that there’s one important and deeply felt driving emotion, solely associated with EVs, that we don’t value enough. It’s the elation you feel when you’ve found a free charger, coaxed it to read your credit card, established a decent connection and settled to wait somewhere comfortable with coffee in hand.
The charging process may take longer than you spend at a petrol pump, but it’s cleaner and it frees you from joining a paying queue that invariably contains someone also doing their weekly shopping.
When fast chargers are eventually in free supply, this feeling of quiet triumph will disappear. We should enjoy it while it’s available.
WEDNESDAY
I found myself mouthing off about classic Range Rovers to a Cotswolds farming friend who keeps lots of old cars in a vast, dry barn. “Come with me,” he said, and we strode into the gloom past hay bales, tractors and several dozen cars of the past 30 years to a seasoned 1980s four-door Range Rover that he still uses when the mood takes him.
It burst immediately into life and he drove it briskly for a few minutes on the farm’s rippled concrete roads, before we swapped seats. Memories came flooding back: bags of body roll, that funny, wide-gate gearchange, lots of transmission backlash between power-on and power-off and a steering system with a handful
