What issues has this vehicle had? It sounds like a nice one, but you are correct that it just will not bring the kind of money you would expect. It is a shame since they are so cool, but at the end of the day, few are the people who will ignore its thirsty nature, and even fewer people are willing to perform the required maintence to keep them in operation condition. They are a very maintenance intensive vehicle and just do not fit well into the market that land rover targeted.
I guess because they are so expensive to build, that the affluent crowd was targeted, but few of the affluent crowd consider wrenching on their car to be a legitimate hobby, in fact it is more the opposite, they expected to get Honda civic reliability for the amount of cash they to become a land rover owner.

If you need a vehicle to take you off road and get you back, it is a perfectly good rig for it, but that assumes you are prepared and have a solid understanding if the failure modes and how to avoid them or how to diagnose and work around them.

My discovery 2 had its issues, but it never stranded me, and always ran really good.

You should post up some pics of your 02.

This forum is a good audience to sell it through IMO.

 

You hit the nail on the head. We thought we could afford it because the original price was no more than other SUVs. We were not prepared for the maintencance, and we don't wrench on our cars, thus relying on the "Stealership" to borrow someone's quote. I put it in the classifieds...it's a great rig. will be sad to see it go, but just can't afford too much more upkeep. We've replaced head gaskets, window guides, various sensors all over the place, that's just off the top of my head....check classified listing. thankfully i have a guy in SF who has been texting me all day and sounds very interested, so fingers crossed it will go to someone who will love it like we have and will be able to afford to care for and feed it.

 

Well, even though this is in the wrong forum, and to avoid leaving everyone else hanging...I have made major improvements to the way the motor is running..to recap, it was surging, idling up to maybe 12 or 1500 rpm, then dropping to near stall..(the original symptom has been a bit dynamic, so bear with me...).

I was having drivability issues withthe car stalling when I came to a stop with AC running. and I had eratic idle, sometimes it would smooth out (usually after sitting at idel a while it would just finally stabilize and purr..).

So anyway, I chased vacuum leaks until I decided there wasnlt one at all. Set the base idle per the book, completely refreshed the ignition system (which was fine BTW, so now I have a good complement of spares to carry into the wild...complete distributor, amp, pickup, ign coil, condensor, cap/rotor/HT leads)

I highly recommend Kingsborn ignition leads, they are extrmemly nicely built (nicer than Magnecor IMO). they fit like a glove and they are very reasonably priced...I've used them in numerous performance applications and they are simply unbeatable..

I started doing some more trouble shooting and discovered that my air cleaner canister was shorted to the chassis, so the MAF which should be floating was registering about 14ohms to the chassis...likely causing so erroneous inputs to the ECU. I ran the car with the MAF unplugged and it ran horrible (but not much different than it was running anyway). I then disconnected the O2 sensors, and completely removed the MAF. The truck ran solid, and had a ton more output than previously (I assume it was in a open loop default run mode, and actually ran really well with no intake restriction whatever..)

So I pulled the O2 sensors and cleaned them really well, they were very crusty, but appear good otherwise.

After reinstalling the cleaned O2 sensors and the MAF (now fully floating again, no shortcut to chassis), the car runs really good again.

The only issue I have now is that when the AC is on, upon accelleration from a dead stop, it hesitates a little (acts like no fuel)..and then runs strong. It runs flawless with the AC off, stable idle, no more whistle either.... I am going to drive it for a while and see if it just needs time to adapt (I've only driven it around about 15minutes so far, but what a world of difference)


Now everything is clean as a whistle, and I feel really good about what I have learned. I think I will scrape up a couple new O2 sensors in the next few months, as well as a MAF to put into my on board spares (well, I will swap the new ones into the vehicle and keep the still functional old stuff).

I find the manuals to be pretty decent for these rigs, but they are not very straight forward to diagnose.

It is my opinion that the factory air cleaner is ultra restrictive, has anyone come up with big free-flowing inlet with a huge filter? Seems like low hanging fruit for getting at power that is there and available...

Buzz, thanks for the help...much appreciated.

 

Try to find a MAF on a donor vehicle, it is a lot cheaper than getting one from on line sources. Ground? Guess that is why the GEMS has it all in a plastic tube.