Man Maths: Land Rover Discovery 4

That’s one thing I love about it. The other is that they are effortlessly cool. Its replacement, the current Discovery 5 is a car that begs you to look at it even though you’d much rather not. It’s a car that seems to value form at least as much as function. By contrast, there’s an honesty, and authenticity about a Disco 4 (and probably even more about its closely related Disco 3 predecessor) that the modern Discovery lacks entirely.

I love its angular shape and the fact there are chunky, heavy, metal controls inside. There is not one whiff of pretence here. It is a car as fit for purpose as a Ferrari F40, a car that knows its only job is to be an all season, all reason beast of burden and is loving every second of it. It’s Britain’s answer to the Toyota Landcruiser Amazon, just a lot cheaper to buy and easier to find.

You can pick up clean cars with five-figure mileages for around £11,000 while a really lovely late 2016 car could be twice as much. What would I do with it? That’s the bit Man Maths tends to omit from the calculation. If I had a Lola T70 MkIIIB I’d use the Disco to tow it all over Europe. But I don’t. I’d have no use for it whatsoever and the fuel bills would break me. But it doesn’t stop me wanting one: we could just as easily have called this column ‘Don’t Blind Me With The Facts.’ And that, in a nutshell, is Man Maths in action.

Free Reads on The Intercooler are freely available for all to read. The vast majority of our stories, including all of our feature articles, sit behind the paywall, only available to subscribers who get unlimited access to our ever-growing library of more than a thousand stories and close to two million words. 

Click here to try The Intercooler completely free for three weeks, with no credit card and no commitment, and gain full access to our multi award-winning website and app.