I have owned from new a Discovery 3 (England) 30,000 miles / 12 months old, no offroad use, which is having a new transfer box fitted after failure of the original. Has anybody else had a major failure similar to this? Could be useful for people to know if this is a common fault on this vehicle. Obviously disappointed with this but generally very pleased with the vehicle otherwise.

 

Curious as to how this came about for you -- was there a failure message? Did the vehicle cease to function? Drivability issues/rough handling?

Thanks!

 

Over several weeks powertrain noise became progressively louder - it started as a whine at high speed (80mph). I took the car to my dealer who suggested tyres!! After 30k it needed replacement tyres anyway so £500 later and same noise I returned to the dealer who diagnosed transfer box failure. I have waited a couple of weeks for LR to authorise replacement - it is going in next tuesday but I have no loan car while they have it for 2 days - dissapointing with a £42k car . I don't use the vehicle for anything other than local (less than 20 miles) trips at the moment as the noise is pretty bad now and I don't want to get stranded! I also own a nissan pickup which has 150k trouble free miles on the clock.

 

I would firstly expect a car while yours is been fixed, as it is not your fault it has failed.

I would think the most likely failure is a bearing inside the box, not a huge job to replace, but time consuming, bearings I have found out over the years can fail either very quickly, (at the sort of milage your talking about) or last forever. Luckily the majority of them seem to fall in the last bracket. And before you say, it doesn't matter who makes them, the last major failure of a bearing, the bearing was realtively new and was from a german manufacturer.

The other cause of this might be that the garage forgot to refill the transferbox after the last service of course... which would speed up bearing failure.

 

I think its important that other owners know about potential problems with the vehicle. If it turns out this is happening to lots of these cars then maybe there should be a recall, if its an isolated incident then LR should take it up with the supplier. I could have had a loan car if I was willing to wait a month!