A Disco 1 is not a cheap vehicle. They generally have low sale prices compared to competitor vehicles because buyers can expect a lot more after-sale expenses. I've owned and offroaded a Discovery 1 for 10 years. You mentioned priorities of "reliability and long range driving." I would advise anyone considering buying one for the long-term to expect expenses to be similar to a new compact 4WD pickup truck. At the moment I estimate that to be $20 to $25K. Buy one of those and you'll have a vehicle that will be pretty reliable for long distance for 15 years. Buy a Discovery 1 or 2 and you can pay less up front, but over 15 years it will easily cost you the difference.

If you have experience offroading, then you know generally what it costs. I've never seen a 4WD bigger than an ATV that went for very long without costing more than $25K. Anyone who says they do it for less isn't really wheeling or they've only been at it a little while. Look what Jeeps cost, and look at what people pay for 4-seat SxS. It's not realistic to think you're going to do it with a Land Rover badge for half as much. What a lot of people do is just dress it up with stupid accessories like heavy steel roof racks, snorkels and limb guards and then when they get sick of paying the bills to keep it mall-worthy, they try to flip without losing their shirt to the next sucker that falls for the Camel Trophy bling.

RV-type camping is similar in a lot of ways. Look at what new, fully-functioning RV's cost -- whether it's a pop-up, slide-in, or single-axle travel trailer. Most of them are flimsy and cheap-quality, but they have all the features at an entry-level cost. If you decide to do-it-yourself, you can probably save money and still get better quality -- but if you're hoping to go overlanding for only a fraction of what a cheap RV costs, you'll be roughing it for sure. RTT's are high-priced and have a lot of shortcomings. On a Disco, they're smaller than better quality ground tents that cost half as much. I would suggest you try ground tent camping out of your 4x4 before you decide to move up to the roof top. If you or your wife find a ground tent intolerable, you'll have saved the cost difference to put toward a trailer.

What you really need to ask yourself before you get into a Discovery 1 or 2 or Range Rover Classic, Series, or some other rabbit-hole project is this: how far are you willing to go before you give up? Suppose you buy on the high-end something in the best condition you can find and you pay over $10K. Then the transmission fails. Of course, you swap it out because you've already got a lot more than that into it. Then you go offroading and realize the Land Rover has open differentials. You either spin tires and break axles or you pay a couple thousand bucks for lockers or limited slips and then break axles. Let's say you just break one axle. Do you replace that one only and keep breaking them one at a time, or do you reckon all the axles are fatigued and replace all of them so you can have confidence offroading? Do you buy stock axles for reliability with stock size tires or do you buy chromoly axles for oversize tires? What are you trying to do? Just restore the original condition or make it reliable for the long-term? Then the steering box fails, so you replace that. Then the brake booster starts to leak and you randomly get a hard pedal, so you order one of those. The previous owner did a half-assed suspension lift with over-weight springs and cheap emulsion OME shocks. You find out the pinion angle on the front is too much for the stock driveshaft the hard way. If you're lucky, it doesn't take out the transmission pan and valve body with it (they tend to do that). You pay almost $500 for a DC driveshaft and you have to decide whether to replace the broken OME with more of those or pay twice as much for rebuildable Fox or King. It depends. Do you want long-term reliability offroad or do you just want to put the mall-crawler crap back on it and shove it off to the next sucker? You're serious, so you go all-in. You soon find yourself $20K into it not counting all the stuff that could be used in another vehicle like the refrigerator, recovery and camping gear (which all adds up to thousands more).

Would you keep going at it with a Land Rover if you started to get up to $30K? Some Jeep guys start at $30K. If that's out of the question for you, then a Land Rover for long distance, off-road reliability is not realistic. If your budget is only half that, you are much better off and can only realistically expect success if you start with a vehicle that has no questions about the long-distance reliability. Then stick to easy dirt roads that are within its capability. If it is not reliable for long distance and the long term for the sale price, then you can only guess what it will cost to get it there. I tell you for Land Rovers, it's higher than you think.

The older Land Rovers are the right vehicle for a person who wants an interesting hobby vehicle with the potential for good offroad capability. They can be comparatively inexpensive to offroad if only short-term (day) use is expected and they're trailered to and from the trail. I estimate they'd cost more than a XJ but less than a Tacoma and they'd be less reliable than both. They can also be the basis of a daily driver for someone who has alternative transportation and who would do all their own work. They're very bad on fuel mileage, but people get into them as a hobby, not for basic transportation, and as a hobby/project vehicle that is not expected to be reliable they can be engaging. If a person would just send it to a shop to replace the water pump or head gaskets, then they'd just be wasting their money with it. Overlanders that are reliable for the long-term are a costly proposition no matter what the base vehicle is. The Land Rovers have their unique challenges and there are many advantages to Toyota (etc.). Nevertheless, if you're really going to spend what it takes, the difference between a Land Rover, Jeep or Toyota as a percentage of the overall cost is not enormous. People that have overlanded in Discoveries and RRC as well as other makes, observe that the Land Rovers have significantly less interior space. They were both originally 2-door SUV's and to the overlander, that's generally how they feel. Among the Discoveries and RRC's contemporaries, D110's and Landcruisers have a lot more space that overlanders value highly. More modern competitors in the US market would be Tacoma Crew Cabs, JLU Gladiators, and full-size pickups.