My Bullshit-Meter™ had served me well for a long time helping to steer me clear of the worse consumer bullshit like PPI and social media influencers. By giving me timely warnings against such foolishness it had saved me a great deal of money. However, it was not perfect and could be over sensitive. Some consumer sucker bullshit like buying cars on Personal Contract Purchase and Payday Loans simply caused it to blow a fuse and require a reset.
My newly acquired version 2.0 of the Bullshit-Meter™, however, was supposed to be better. It was able to cope with all manner of marketing and advertiser crap without busting a gut. The Bullmeister needed to test this out. I considered visiting a bank for investment advice or getting a quote for an Equity Release Mortgage to test this new improved Bullshit-Meter™. But I needed something stronger. I needed to go to the very epicentre of consumer sucker bullshit. That high temple of crap.
It was time for the Bullmeister to pay a visit to the local Land Rover dealership.
Range Rover
This whole range of cars sums up all that is wrong with modern consumer society. A range of vehicles sold on the promise they can do a job few, if any, of the target customers will ever require it to do. All wrapped up in the most ridiculous and transparent marketing crap. The products may be an easy target for ridicule but that was not going to stop the Bullmeister. He just couldn’t resist.
The first job was to visit the Land Rover website (https://landrover.co.uk) to configure a custom-built Range Rover and see just how much a spoilt Saudi prince might cough up for one of these things. The range starts at £83,655 but nobody pays that. The average is well over £100,000. The first upgrade selectable is the long-wheelbase version at £115,875. Not enough? What about the 5.0L Supercharged version at £179,675? Perfect for accelerating the Climate Emergency while making clear to the plebs that you don’t give a fuck about anyone.
Using that model as a solid foundation to build upon I added a tacky paint finish suitable for any footballer’s wife. Two-tone paint in Spectral Racing Red? £16,625 to you, Sir. The option of quilted leather finish for the seating was suitably naff and only added another £4,390.
The Range Rover already comes with 21” wheel rims and low profile tyres which anybody that knows anything about off-roading will tell you are completely useless. These things suffer burst tyres after hitting small potholes on the motorway. You can not take them off-road. Maybe I’m missing the point. This is not a serious car. It is a toy. So let’s go all the way and opt for the ultra low profile tyres on 22” rims with the diamond-turned lacquer finish that chips and scratches easily. And then corrodes under the lacquer after 3 years. Lovely.
Continuing through the custom build process things just get sillier. How about Vintage Tan Tailgate Event Seating for £6,020? Personalised Treadplates for all doors were a bargain at £1,206 (they would require replacement on resale unless the name was generic and just said ‘Dick Head’ and would, therefore, suit all future owners), a Security Box for your valuables at £478, Aluminium Gearshift Paddles came to £400. I even added a Battery Conditioner at £179 in the hope the car might maintain a battery charge after being weighted down with so many toys. The list seemed endless and I selected everything (you know somebody, somewhere has actually done this). I topped it off with Snow Chains at £594 to guarantee you would trash the aforementioned diamond-cut wheels.
The total came to £216,403.00 (see https://build.landrover/88344735)
Available for you to purchase today with just a single click.
Now, the Bullmeister is a wealthy man. After liquidating some assets he could easily stump up for several of these things. That is only possible because he has earned a good (not massive) salary and has never bought a new car. The savings from this have been invested and grown rather nicely over the last 20 years. But he was still interested to know what he had been missing all these years by driving cheap second-hand economical cars.
The Bullshit-Meter™ was by this point reading maximum but was, amazingly, still functioning under this onslaught. No reset required. I needed to try harder. I needed to go for a test drive.
I knew just rocking up in my Nissan Leaf electric car and pretending to be interested in a Range Rover would not be very believable and I might not be taken seriously. Even with a VAT registered business with a large turnover and a house of the type you might expect to see a new Range Rover parked outside, I just wasn’t likely to be mistaken for a footballer or a South London gangster in the market for a pimp machine. Besides, this was not the purpose of this experiment. Nobody doubts how much money a footballer can waste on cars and other crap. What I wanted to know was how much a slightly more typical consumer could waste on the rubbish further down the range.
The Land Rover Discovery
I abandoned the Range Rover in my shopping cart and instead looked at the Land Rover Discovery. I was after all the target customer for this car. That is if I had been a total wanker. I wanted to know what I had been missing for the approximately £1,000,000 it would have cost for my wife and myself to have run two similar cars for the last 20 years. That is if we had bought them new on 4-year PCP contracts and replaced them at the end of each period. That is how long I could have bought one but resisted the temptation.
The Discovery section of the Land Rover website is even more amusing than that for the Range Rover. There is less emphasis on luxury and more on the off-road ability of this model. A full-screen video plays as the Discovery transverses an off-road test track. This track had so obviously been prepared with the help of a large earth mover. I imagine the production team making this video kept working the track with earth-moving machines to break up some of the larger rocks and clear a path until it was just right – not too difficult but still tricky enough to look impressive. More ridiculous still is the section where a Discovery wades through deep water in a channel that had again clearly been prepared beforehand with a JCB. With special ramps to ensure the car could get in and out easily. The sort of thing you might find at an ‘off-road adventure’ centre. Out of shot, no doubt would have been a water supply and drainage system to keep the water at the exact right depth. Deep enough to look impressive and ride over the bonnet but carefully controlled so as not to be too deep. The whole thing was so contrived. I was reminded of the trick shots snooker players use to show off their skills and which require very careful setup beforehand. In short, it was bullshit.
Who falls for this? LandRover might market it as a car able to cross the Himalayas but that is just crap. The Discovery even has a plastic underbody cover to make it more aerodynamic. How do you think that would cope with serious off-roading? It’s a joke. Nobody that needs this type of vehicle buys Range Rover/Land Rover – they are simply not taken seriously. If you need a reliable and tough workhorse you buy a Nissan, Mitsubishi, or Toyota. The Army don’t buy them. The United Nations don’t buy them for its weapons inspectors. Even the National Trust don’t buy them anymore and long ago replaced them with Japanese 4-wheel-drives where these are required. And not just because of the cost. This is just a toy to massage men’s egos. The Land Rover Discovery is amongst the least reliable new cars available today. Ignore the supposed ability to ford rivers, it is the new car most likely to get bogged down in your local supermarket because the Piece of Shit has broken down…again! It is possibly the worse example of consumer sucker bullshit. Expensive and environmentally damaging they promise to do a job they will never be required to tackle while simultaneously being unfit to do the job you actually need it for. So, let us stop pretending you will use this for off-road use and instead judge it for what it is – a very unreliable family car. And an expensive one at that.
Continuing to the ‘Build your own’ section and choosing the cheapest Discovery I added only those features that come with pretty much any other new car but it still added up to £55,404 (see https://build.landrover/15E6B4A5). Remember this is the base model. You could easily spend over £100,000 if you choose the larger engines and added all the crap. There is even the option of electrically deployable side steps (£3,163) to aid entry in what is a tall car with large ground clearance. The problem with these steps (aside from the outrageous price) is that they reduce the ground clearance! This is very typical of 4×4 cars in general. So much effort and complexity (and weight) is added to get over the inherent problems caused by design restrictions imposed by the off-road requirement. So, for example, the car has to be tall with large wheel articulation but this requires complicated air suspension to raise and lower the body so it handles well on the road and is not unstable at speed. But this suspension just adds weight and cost. And the complexity makes the car expensive to maintain. There is even a market for removing this type of suspension on older cars and converting them to plain coil springs because it has proved so unreliable. How mad is that! And so it goes on. One bad compromise after another to solve a problem of their own making.
All so the driver can indulge in some schoolboy fantasy he is Bear Grylls. Except I never actually see many people with 4×4 cars at my local sailing lake or walking in the Welsh Mountains. Possibly because owners of expensive cars are too busy working to pay for them and have no time for real outdoor adventures. Or perhaps they only like the idea of adventure. Maybe they don’t realise real adventure requires muscles, not motors. Most serious walkers have front-wheel drive family cars because they know you can get to the Welsh Mountains USING ONLY PAVED ROADS! From there you park your car and WALK. Sitting your lardy fat arse in a Lazy-Boy motorised 4×4 armchair while you chew up the countryside pumping out pollution is not a sport. You are not Bear Grills. You are not an adventurer. You are a wanker. With a fat lardy arse. So just stop that crap.
So, now we know how much they cost and what we might use this thing for it was time to see what they drove like on the road.
This was going to be way too much fun.
The Discovery Test Drive
The only Discovery on display in the local Land Rover showroom was a 3.0 Litre SD6 Diesel HSE Luxury for £73,000. Crazy price for a silly toy it had every conceivable gadget you would never need. It even had the ridiculous side steps. Sitting in the interior was lovely but not Lexus quality. And the dashboard display very dated and slow. Within a few years, you’d abandon the built-in sat-nav and use your phone attached to the dash. Just like I have with every car I’ve ever driven with built-in sat-nav. Why do car manufacturers even bother? The only real hope of staying current is Apple CarPlay or the Android equivalent. Car makers should just forget about nearly all the rest.
The salesman was insisting I went on a test drive. I would have if I’d had the time. Just to satisfy my curiosity and have something to write about. But really, who cares what it drives like? I’d never get over the knowledge I was a consumer sucker arsehole. A smooth ride could never compensate for that feeling. I was surprised by my sudden and complete disinterest in even test driving the car. He wondered if I was worried about the size and assured me it would melt away on driving it. Probably not as fast as the owners’ bank balance. This Discovery he went on to assure me, unlike the last one, was much lighter, more nimble and much less truck like. And they had sorted the reliability issues that had plagued the last model. I wondered if he had said that same thing while demonstrating the previous model?
It was too much for the Bullshit-Meter™ and it finally blew a fuse. I made my excuses and left.
Once you understand and see past the marketing crap and social conventions things suddenly become very clear. By training your mind to appreciate what you have and choosing your own metrics to measure something by you become completely free of the desire for this type of consumer bullshit. You don’t need a Bullshit-Meter™ to tell you driving a 4×4 around town is silly, anti-social, unethical, and just plain stupid. I can honestly say if I won a Land Rover Discovery in a prize draw (unlikely as the Bullmeister is constitutionally barred from gambling), and assuming I was not allowed to sell it for cash, I would not even bother to collect it from the dealership. Why would I want this dinosaur? The expense and hassle would be a millstone around my families neck, never mine the nightmare of parking this beast.
That is the real benefit of life hacks like these. Not just to save you money but to win your freedom. Freedom to live your life on your terms and have the money available to do so.
The Bullmeister