Our Cars: Range Rover P550e Autobiography

I think I mentioned last time that one of the more difficult choices I had to make when speccing this car was whether to choose the petrol or diesel version of the 3-litre ‘Ingenium’ engine, the V8 being clearly beyond my wallet’s ability to maintain. In the end I went for the petrol plug-in hybrid not because I thought it the better choice for me, but because I thought it might make a better story for you. I know, I’m all heart.

But still the question niggled, and clearly the only way it would be answered would be to spend time in a diesel Rangie. And while I was there I could also answer two other questions about the choice of car that remained outstanding: is the long wheelbase seven-seater better than the standard car I have, and how much would I miss the glitzy ‘Autobiography’ specification of ‘my’ car when planted in a mid-range ‘HSE’ model. With all this in mind and a decent journey ahead, a D350 HSE long wheelbase, seven-seat diesel Range Rover was duly booked.

I took my elder daughter and our destination was Bruges, a place I must have passed several hundred times but never actually visited. Our motive was the purest geekery, our goal to find as many locations from the film In Bruges as we possibly could in two days. I won’t bang on about it, because discussing a film most of your audience may never have seen is about the most boring thing a writer can do, but said daughter and I remain in a state of constant amazement that it’s not generally regarded as the greatest work of art ever committed to celluloid. As well as possibly the funniest.