Land Rover and Range Rover are not really the same thing - and real men drive a Series Three, not a Defender, let alone that panty-waisted Discovery 
This is not about a Range Rover this is about your wife’s self image. Range Rover may be a pricey vehicle of middling reliability, but they are the God Kings of lifestyle marketing. Your wife wants to be a Range Rover kind of woman. She likes the things a Range Rover would say about her.
“Buying a used Range Rover - am I nuts?”
It depends on what you are going to do with it. Are you a director and need to send a car over a cliff? Probably a good choice then.
I didn’t know there were people that had positive associations with it. I always assumed the people that bought these cars just liked the looks and didn’t realize beforehand how bad they are.
This is spot on. Women love Range Rovers, It’s like the boxy styling elicits some kind of bizzare estrogen response that drives them absolutely wild.
Well, “middling reliability” is pretty charitable. A 10 year old Ford Focus is a car of “middling reliability”, meaning it has some annoying quirks requiring an occasional repair outside of ordinary maintainance, but otherwise will start and drive pretty much all the time. Range Rovers don’t really measure on the same scale.
The positive associations are with the cachet, too elegantly cool and feet-on-the-ground to drive a Mercedes or Jaguar. How bad they are is a whole different dimension that doesn’t factor into the equation.
Thereis nowt wrong with Jags that age. Latterday XJ40s were fine and XJ300s and so on are all fooking amazing. I am too lazy to check but I would expect X-type wasn’t sold in America.
What appears on used car lots is irrelevant.
Similarly, the Range Rover became a heck of a lot more reliable when the new model was brought in around 2002. That’s why there’s the big difference in price.
So, we have a bunch of “they’re unreliable money pits” and one “they’re unreliable money pits, but totally worth it”
Astro, it’s no so much about being a RR woman, it’s about having a car that she finds interesting. If we can afford a car that is both useful and interesting, that’s better than one that’s useful and boring. And, for me personally, I’m a bit tired of driving cars that are borderline embarrassing to be seen in. Something with a little cachet would be nice. Of course, if we can’t afford interesting, she’ll have to live with boring.
I’d like to thank everyone again for your comments, it’s been very helpful.
Add another “unreliable money pit”. My boss is on her second since I’ve been working for her and the damn thing is constantly in the shop with random (and expensive) things going wrong.
A lot of this stuff is based on people’s first experiences with Range Rovers. From the P38A onwards, there’s nothing really wrong with any Land Rover product reliability-wise. It’s the first generation model that you have to worry about, and frankly that’s the case with all British cars of that era (designed by British Leyland, electrics by Lucas, and as Clarkson likes to say, “built by communists”.)
Yep, nothing wrong at all. The randomly locking up front differential is really special.
There is no bottom to the depravity that a Jaguar/Land Rover apologist would sink.
Are Range Rovers still built with Lucas electrical systems? I can anyway recommend a Haynes service manual as a useful extra to any British car you would consider buying.
This is seriously one of the most bizarre posts I have seen on SDMB.
Any amount of fact checking show that Land Rover is consistently at the very bottom of reliability ratings and usually by a wide margin and this is in recent years.
Serious question: Why post something so completely wrong? What is your motivation?
OP, do you need an SUV or something AWD?
If not, have you looked at the Honda Accord coupe? That is a damn fine car (and reliable to boot). It’s not on the table for me since I need AWD but I loved tooling around in a friend’s not long ago. Or perhaps an Acura coupe?
Okay, perhaps I should rephrase: they’re much better now than in the past. The OP already knows he’s (she’s?) not getting something bulletproof, or even close; the point is that if you bought a 10 year old Range Rover today it would be a million times more reliable than the 10 year old Range Rover you bought in 2000.
problem is, that goes for the entire industry too.
See, this is the problem I have with “premium” marques and the people who buy them. It seems like the more expensive a car is, the more eager the owners are to forgive its unreliability. in another thread, we have someone talking about “lemon laws” because a Mustang has a suspension squeak, yet people who own VWs, Rovers, BMWs, and the like rave about the cars even though their reliability has been- if not in the toilet- at least on the edge of the bowl. Problems that would be unforgivable in a $13,000 Focus are just “par for the course” in a European car.
I own one of the cars you mentioned but only the naive and dumb keep them past 10 years as their daily driver. Smart people unload them just before the warranties expire. And the really smart people keep a reliable extra car around to drive when their luxury car is in the shop.
thank you for so clearly illustrating my point.
or, have I been whooshed?