Land Rover

Where to find Land Rover owners handbooks & service manuals online…

There are some great official sites where you can find just about any information you’d need for most models from the ‘90’s through today.

TOPIx – which is linked at the bottom of the landroverusa.com site and describes itself as:

TOPIx provides fast, online access to everything you need to enable you to deliver vehicle service and repair for Jaguar Land Rover customers.

The TOPIx site is great, it’s where you can find both owners manuals & service/repair info.  The owners manuals are free and don’t require registration.  The service/repair pages do require both registration and a subscription to the site.  Anyone can get a subscription and the prices vary depending on the info you want, how many models (i.e. all Land Rovers, a single model all years or a single model for one year), and how long you want access for(1 hour, day, week, month or year).  To give you an example, if you wanted to get the info for a 2008 Range Rover for 1 day, it’s $14, while all years for the New Range Rover for a day would be $23.  One more example, all models & years for a day is $46.

It can really be worth the money when you need some info you just can’t find anywhere else.  Like all the other sites, there’s not much thought put into the navigation design.  After selecting the model & year, you have to find the link that says Owner on the far right then find the link that says Owners Handbooks on the far left.  Then you’re stuck viewing a small frame on the page with the actual PDF content – lots of scrolling.  If you do select there “Maximise” icon, it just opens the PDF full screen, which is annoying in another way.

I would just assume with Land Rover sending people here directly from the home page for handbooks, it may make more sense to make the handbooks/Owners section front & center

Land Rover Owner Information

This is the site I’ve always used for Owners manuals and I think it is actually fewer clicks to the information you want when compared to TOPIx.  I’m not sure why Land Rover doesn’t link to this site directly off the home page, it’s just an easier site to navigate, but it doesn’t have service/repair info.

Here too you can find all sort of documents – the 2011 Range Rover Owners Handbook does reference this site, suggest for downloading the Land Rover Off-Road Driving handbook.

Owner Information Webshop

Here’s where you can buy actual hard copy printed materials – lost handbooks, wiring diagrams, etc…  As an example the full literature pack for a 2010 Range Rover is about $116.  This site is another one with an odd user experience – after registering, you just stare at a page that says “You’ve registered”, you have to find a small link in the corner to get you back to the content page, a redirect or larger, more obvious link couldn’t hurt.

All three sites are oddly designed with pop-ups and frames; which I assume is for some kind of I.P. protection, but with a little time, everything is downloadable, so they should just give us the option of downloading the entire PDF directly instead of all the clicking and waiting for each individual chapter.  On more then one occasion, I’ve had to close the window and start the process again because it just wouldn’t load a section, it gets old fast.

And even though the user interface/experience was a complete & terrible afterthought, I do thank them for putting all this info online.  Now why not put a small amount of effort into it and give us direct downloads.  Go check out how Mercedes-Benz does it and you’ll see how good & easy it could be.

Is the Range Rover Evoque, the 2010 production version of the Range Stormer?

Land Rover did their first-ever concept to preview a new production model back in 2004 with the Range Stormer.  It was our first intro into what would become the first addition to the Range Rover line – the Range Rover Sport.  The Sport was done when they showed the concept for the first time.  So it was more like they took a soon to be released vehicle and created a concept from it.  That’s all old news though, what I wanted to say today was something that caught me off-guard.  We’ve seen the Stormer since 2004 and the final 2-door Evoque was revealed back in June.  The Stormer always seemed to me as a blurry vision of the Sport, what I mean by that is, squint while looking at the Stormer from a distance and it’s a Sport.  However, if you really look at it today, it’s an Evoque with 2004-era Land Rover styling.  And I’m sure the 2-door version is biasing my opinion, but look at how many cues are there.  And I do of course realize they should have similar cues if they’re all basically “Range Rovers.

Look as those wheel arches that intersect the hood line.  Roof line looks closer to Evoque then Sport.  Hood louvers.

Big spoiler & Angular Exhaust – And they both seem to have glass roofs.

And I’ll close with a no longer valid & somewhat now sad quote from the 2004 Range Stormer Press Release:

Like all Land Rovers, the four-wheel drive is engaged permanently…

It’s the “Like all” part that really shows its age.

2011 Land Rover LR4 – Range Rover – Range Rover Sport Brochures in JPEG format

All of the pages have been converted to JPEG & add to the gallery:

2011 Range Rover – US Version

2011 Range Rover Sport – US Version

2011 Land Rover LR4

Range Rover Evoque – Photo-shoot in London

I realize this is a week or two old, I had re-tweeted it from Land Rover UK on August 20th.  I should have posted it here too – so for the record, here’s the video made up of shoots taken from a 2-door Range Rover Evoque photo-shoot in London.

I think this is actually the most we’ve ever seen of the rear of a non-camouflaged Evoque.  There aren’t any official rear shots I can find and in the press videos, they don’t do a full shot of the rear, just close-ups.  We saw the LRX from behind, but it is slightly different from that.  And the new shots do make it look like we may be getting the standard Range Rover split tailgate.

In addition, like all the 2010+ models, they’ve removed the rear Land Rover badge, however the model name has moved from the right side like the other Land Rovers to the left.

And finally, in these pics you can see both standard exhausts and more angular ones as well.  So maybe they’ll be doing an “LRX Edition” à la the “Stormer Edition” that they did for the Sport.

landroverusa.com–typos & inconsistencies

I need to preface this critique by saying, I know my site is nowhere near perfect.  I’m sure a quick look here will find typos, grammar mistakes & more.  However, this site isn’t owned by a multi-billion dollar company, yes it’s true.  I would just assume that Land Rover could have someone working for them that could do a spell-check on what they write.  Same with the differences in US vs. UK English.  I have no problem with them sticking with the UK version of things, but as you’ll see, they just switch back and forth on the same page.  Then there’s product branding, if a feature has a unique copyrighted name, shouldn’t it be written the same way every time?  Finally, an example of just using the wrong picture, that should have been caught.

Anyway, here we go – click on any of the images for a larger view.  All of these shots were taken from the landroverusa.com website.  It took about 20 minutes to go through and find them.  I’m contacted Land Rover in the past about others I’ve found, some they fixed, others they ignored.  Click on any of the images for a larger version.

Misspellings:

Inconsistent Branding, first one below is from the LR2 page which does show CommandShift the same in both spots:

Now the Range Rover – Written two different ways, inches apart:

Range Rover Sport – a space has been added to one of the words:

And finally the LR4 page – at least it’s consistent, both with a lowercase “shift”:

Center vs. Centre – so here’s some of that inconsistent English, first from the LR4, it’s a “Center console”:

Then we’ll jump right to the Range Rover with options in either spelling style just paragraphs apart:

Finally, I’ll just start with the screenshot from the Range Rover page:

It’s pretty clear to see that the picture on the left is a Range Rover Sport, and when I say it’s pretty clear, I mean to the web designer who stares at these vehicles all day and who I would hope knows the product design, even slightly.  Now I’m not sure who made the mistake here, the name of that specific image is: opt_us_l322_a-airbags1.jpg – so it’s clear it is named incorrectly because L322 refers to the Range Rover model line, while L320 refers to the Sport.

If we go to the Range Rover Sport page and look for that picture, it’s there and with the proper Range Rover Sport designation: opt_us_l320_a-airbag.jpg

And just for the heck of it, here’s the full-size version( optoly_us_l320_a-rsc.jpg) :

And so as to not just pick on the US site, I caught this one a while back on the LR UK site – DBA vs. DAB.

And to quickly close, again I know someone could nit-pick my site to death, but for a large company to have such silly mistakes, it’s disappointing.  I’m actually considering looking at some of the other car manufacturer sites to see if there’s a correlation between their J.D. Power ranking and the silly mistakes on their sites.

P.S. I do realize how insane this post is, I really do.

5 Classic Defender Ads – from back before the airbag rules killed them for the U.S.

13 new Land Rover Discovery Print Advertisements–From back in the good old days of Land Rover adverts

1974 – a guide to Land-Rover expeditions

Click for the PDF version – it’s a great read.

Some new early Freelander print ads

Updated Land Rover Badging

Shown here on the 2011 LR2 / Freelander 2, they’ve changed from the gold lettering to silver – more like the Supercharged badges on the Range Rovers.  I just wonder if this change will be for all Land Rovers or just the diesel models in Europe? wink, wink…