Thread: D4 Reliability

A wheel bearing can happen to anyone or any vehicle.

Two electrical issues hardly makes for a lemon - what were the issues? Did you do a restart or did you do a hard reset? How did you get left on the side of the road - very few things will actually completely stop you.

Garry

No.
No you cant trust it.
sell it to me.

Toyotas and Nissans also regularly leave their driver standing by the road but everyone always says "that's unusual you must have been unlucky". But when a Land Rover does it everyone says, " well what do you expect its a Land Rover"

A mate of mine had to pay about $17,000 to have his two year old Patrol recovered from the Canning Stock route when his clutch failed a few years ago.

I certainly wouldn't be 2 worried electrical problems happening just twice over 70000kms is pretty good and as said a wheel bearing well that's trivial as it can happen to any car at any time!! You can't live your life by ifs and buts over 2 small problems.

Yeah I worry every day about it, I went into a cold sweat yesterday, we were going to the shops and the missus said, lets take the Disco, oh no I thought, we could be stranded and at Menai of all places.

I knew we should have bought that Toyota, the piece of mind we could be having

Baz.

Originally Posted by garrycol

A wheel bearing can happen to anyone or any vehicle.

Two electrical issues hardly makes for a lemon - what were the issues? Did you do a restart or did you do a hard reset? How did you get left on the side of the road - very few things will actually completely stop you.

Garry

Thanks for your replies guys.
Actually, the mechanic I use for non lr stuff implied that 70,000km old cars dont do wheel bearings. But turned out it did .. and a 100km tilt tray fixed it.
As for the electrics, one "Engine System Failure" .. another 100km tilt tray having been advised not to drive it, even in limp mode.
First electrical .. limp mode for 150km (to dealer) with every error code known to mankind flashing at me. Turned out to be a failed battery (@20,000km). Strangely, no error saying "battery voltage low - ignore other error codes".

Fact remains, Land Rovers don't score highly on reliability. Last of all manufacturers in US.
I don't think this is helped by things like LR Aust apparently not recalling the "engine system failure" fault for the software update fix because it doesn't happen to all vehicles.

It would seem that Discoverys have perhaps got more reliable with each successive model but started from a pretty low base. It also seems something that owners are loathe to discuss despite this being the ideal forum to collect data and feed it back to LR to assist in rectification work.

At least these days you can sit on the side of the road and google the fault and know you are not alone.

Mechanics say a lot of things. It's true, you'd hope to get more than 70K out of wheel bearings, but I know many much smaller lighter cars that have done wheel bearings with under 50K. Golf IVs and any car based on it (Audi a3, TT, beetle, etc) are one that are notorious for wheel bearings.

Have the two rear suspension uprights from my Audi A4 in the boot of my RRS at the moment because both rear wheel bearings failed simultaneously... Thankfully they didn't strand the car and just made a loud howling noise.

205K on my RRS 2.7 now and it has done many many long trips - the alternator is the only thing that seriously went wrong with it, and thankfully that was around town. If it failed in Central QLD around Aramac or somewhere like that, that would potentially have been an issue, but it didn't. I did have an alternator fail on a Nissan 300km from Adelaide and had to get my brother to drive me up another one.

The bottom line is, things go wrong with cars - no matter how old or new they are, there's no truly reliable car. The good news is, you fix them, then something else will go wrong, and you can stop worrying about the first thing. That's why I always tell people to just get the car they want and not worry about it!

Buy a Toyota if it will make you feel better spending money fixing that instead of the LR, but after driving the D4 I don't see how you could be satisfied with an LC or a Prado...

Originally Posted by CraigA

It also seems something that owners are loathe to discuss despite this being the ideal forum to collect data and feed it back to LR to assist in rectification work.

At least these days you can sit on the side of the road and google the fault and know you are not alone.

You have obviously only had a very brief look through this forum.

I don't think I have seen another forum where people more openly discuss the problems that they have encountered with their vehicles.

So far, touch wood, I haven't had any problems worth mentioning with my D4 - but I am confident that if I do, there will be a thread on it in here somewhere discussing the problem and how to fix it.

I have owned way more Toyotas than I have Landrovers - and have experienced far more concerning problems with some of the Toyotas than I have ever seen in the Landrovers. Some of the Toyotas gave me trouble free motoring though.

You need to find a new mechanic - one who knows his stuff and doesn't just pass on "anecdotal" evidence. I have seen wheel bearings fail with way less km on them than you have experienced - and strangely enough - these were on Toyotas.