I do not think that Land Rovers Discoverys are good cars, and here's one of the reasons why.....

LAND ROVER’S FAULTY IMMOBILISER

We’d like to give you a swell idea to play a trick on any acquaintance of yours (un)lucky enough to own a 4x4 Rover, be it a Range or a Discovery. Find an excuse for meeting him in the centre of your Italian hometown, getting sure that he’s driving his beloved Land Rover by-product. As the meeting point, choose a parking lot under the central Police Station, the place where the boys in blue operate their main transceiver. Stop, wait, greet your friend whilst he park, make sure he locks the car while you drag him in the nearest coffee shop for a quick espresso. Back to the Rover: now, savour the face of your friend while he tries to open and unlock the car. There are very strong chances that he will not be able to do so: his immobiliser will not let him in, and if it does, alarm already screaming, the engine will not start. It’s blocked, paralysed.

At this point, your friend is stalled; he gets nervous. He’s supposedly able to open the car manually, following a special procedure, but it’s tiresome, it’s easy to fail; the alarm siren begins to wail after a short time, and he gets even more nervous thinking that some cop will get out and shoot him as a car thief.  There’s only one way out: push the car 300 metres off the Police building, or, better still, call a wrecker.

The problem is the Italian police radios apparently emit ‘harmonics’ of the main radio frequency exactly on the wavelength used by the Rover and every other manufacturer for the remote control, 433 Mhz. Rovers’ fault is that their system is not shielded enough, so it’s vulnerable to those harmonics, that the electronic brain allegedly reads as if a thief is trying to find the ‘code’ and triggers its reaction of defence (the blockage). It’s interesting to note that this problem apparently exists only in Italy, and that the folks at Rover Italia never tried to fix it, leaving to the dealers this headache. So, since almost two years, if you’re unlucky enough to park your Rover near a Police transceiver when they’re broadcasting, chances are that, zap!, you’d be locked out of your car.

“If it’s the driver of a Rover off-roader calling, and it’s Piazza Roosevelt” the weary driver of the wrecker told us when we found ourselves stranded in this place, our 1997 Discover hopelessly dead, “we don’t even think that it may be something else. We just tow the car down this street until we reach Via Ugo Bassi (300 yards) and, usually, it starts again.”

Why do this happen? “Oh, I don’t know” the driver mutters, carelessly, “they simply didn’t check if their immobiliser worked correctly in Italy. A detail.” A silly omission, we would like to add.

Does it happen often? “Well, I’d say that we have several cases a months with Rovers alone. There’s a Korean car that has the same type of trouble, but I’ve been told that they are fixing it.” And Rover? Is Rover taking steps to fix this situation? “I don’t know”, the driver says, fastening chains and warning signs to the immobilised Disco before getting back at the wheel of his cab, “there is roughly the same number of Discovery and Range blocked every week since a couple of years, so I think that they’re probably not quick enough.” Bernd Pischetsrieder blamed Land-Rover for the appalling build quality of some models, but little happened since. And the immobiliser blockage might be a benign event, after all; I know a guy whose brand-new Range 4.6 went up in flames a few weeks ago, allegedly because a fuel line was faulty.

After all, the immobiliser trick will put a stuffy Discovery owner to shame with little trouble. A mean joke, you say? Probably you’re right. On the other hand, we never suggested to do this trick to your best friend. But you would never recommend a Disco to your best friend, would you?

Stefano Pasini, 2.1999 (reprinted from 'The Daily Telegraph')