Range Rover Vogue TD6 | Shed of the Week

James Bond likes a gamble. His exploits on the poker table will occasionally get him into trouble, as they did in Casino Royale. 

Some might say that buying an L322 Range Rover with a warning message on the dash is the motoring equivalent of being tied naked to a bottomless chair while a sweaty bloke prepares to swing a heavy-knotted mooring rope up into your gentleman’s area. A few days after the Sheds had watched that scene in Casino Royale Shed noticed some disturbing catalogues addressed to Mrs Shed arriving on the coconut welcome mat. One of them featured a medieval spiked mace ball on a chain being wielded with some intent by a well-built female Visigoth wearing a horned helmet. Shed has since slipped the local Evri agent a tenner not to deliver anything heavy to his house, a request the geezer was happy to be paid for as he was doing that anyway. 

In the case of this 2004 Range Rover Vogue, the potential thwack in the nadgers appears in pic 10 of the ad where you will see, defiantly displayed by the few pixels that bravely remain on the screen, a message reading ‘HDC INACTIVE’. This means that Hill Descent Control isn’t working. Our friend AI tells us that this can be triggered by a low battery voltage during engine startup. If that’s true, and who knows how much of AI actually is true, there could be an easy solution here. Or you could just avoid going down any ludicriously steep and/or muddy slopes. 

Unfortunately AI then goes on to say that an inactive HDC could also be caused by issues with the alternator, with the sensors for suspension, steering or wheel speed, with the wiring, or just with extreme temperatures. We’ve had a few of those in the UK recently and there’s not a lot the next owner of this RR can do about them in the short term. The other stuff, sure, but where do you draw the line? Maybe at the purchase of a new battery. If that doesn’t work, put the old one back in, sell the new one and put the car back onto the classifieds conveyor belt where it currently sits at £1,895. 

Forum posters will tell you that inactive HDCs could be just the start of your troubles with a TD6 Range Rover, the last one of which appeared in SOTW exactly one year ago. More on that in a minute. What might those troubles be? Well, your air suspension might not have the right amount of air in it, or any air at all, the concept of long-term reliability in this department having received less time from LR’s development engineers (or maybe less money from LR’s accountants) than it might have. Sensors and compressors do fail. Pumps are often easy to fix using cheap rebuild kits. Even if it’s beyond fixing, a replacement item won’t be a king’s ransom at under £200 and it will be very easy to fit.  

Engine wise, the 174hp/288lb ft 2.9 M57 inline six single-turbo diesel more commonly seen in lighter BMW saloons was arguably overmatched by the 2.4-tonne Vogue. Again there will be posters on here warning you off the M57 (and, in this heavier-duty application, the gearbox) as the work of the devil and unfit for anything bar melting down for scrap. Shed takes the view that this will apply to most engines if they’re not maintained. Sadly, when it comes to engines in sub-£2k Range Rovers maintenance is the sort of thing that many owners consider to be the responsibility of either previous owners or the next ones rather than themselves. As a result, they are often neglected. The MOT history of this one shows it struggling along for year after year with the same list of advisories for worn suspension parts. Read into that what you will. Interestingly the most recent MOT at 166,000 miles revealed nothing more than a slightly defective offside front headlamp lamps. Sadly there are as yet no legal restrictions on vape vents, of which it has many, but apart from those and the well-worn driver’s area it looks clean enough inside and out. 

A word of caution though. The Martini-striped £1,690 TD6 HSE that Shed featured last July was also given a clean MOT pass in May 2024 at the same sort of mileage as this one. Unfortunately this year’s test on that Martini car wasn’t so nice, throwing up fails on excessive corrosion to the offside rear suspension mount and a seriously leaky nearside front shock. Both of those issues were fixed to get it through the test, but the owner chose not to address the advisories for front and rear structural corrosion that – so far at least – haven’t reduced its rigidity. Will it survive to next summer? And if it does, will it be worth putting through another test? Seems unlikely somehow. 

That’s the thing about Range Rover ownership. There’s just no way of knowing what cards Lady Luck will deal – it’s all part of the excitement. When everything’s going well in a Vogue there’s not much out there to beat it. You’ll be awed by its effortless ability on any surface, by its luxury and comfort, and by its imperious peasant-humbling stance on the road, and all of it for well under two grand. When it’s not going well though you’ll be scratching your head in a funk of puzzlement and fear at the potential content and size of the bill that’s about to be generated. Whichever way you look at it though, there’s never a dull moment. And a Vogue will be a lovely and comfortable place to sit while you await recovery.