Used Land Rover Discovery long-term test
Our deputy editor thinks that by choosing a used company car, he can live the high life on a budget – over the new few months, we'll see if that's the case...
The car Land Rover Discovery D350 35th Edition Run by Darren Moss, deputy editor
Why it’s here To show that you don’t have to buy new to enjoy big-car luxury
Needs to Be both practical and comfortable for family trips, cosseting on the motorway and unflinchingly reliable
Mileage on arrival 13,325 Mileage now 14,131 List price when new £82,925 Value on arrival £65,900 Official economy 33.4mpg Test economy 30.3mpg
9 January 2026 – Meet your maker
The other day something very unexpected happened, because I met one of the people who actually made my Land Rover Discovery. I was up in Nottinghamshire filming for this year’s What Car? Safety Award video with Thatcham Research, and one of its experts, Yousif Al-Ani.
These days, Yousif works as a principal engineer for Thatcham, helping the organisation to assess the advanced safety systems of the latest cars, but in a previous life he worked for Jaguar Land Rover, leading the team that designed, among other things, the radar and camera software on my fifth-generation Land Rover Discovery.
And it turns out they’re even more intricate systems than I realised. For example, because Land Rover owners are more likely to take their cars off-road than owners of other brands, the radars and cameras in my car won’t turn themselves off after a set period of not seeing any objects or road markings like they might in other cars. And while some systems will shut down if its individual sensors are obscured by water, snow or ice, the Discovery’s setup will try to keep going by alternating between using the windscreen camera or using its radar.
Of course, having so many cameras and other pieces of technology around the car can make repair costs higher, so something as simple as a stone chip in your windscreen could lead to a replacement if it’s left untreated. You can imagine my frustration, then, when on the drive home from filming the tell-tale thud a stone hitting my windscreen caused me to wince – and even more so when I got home and found a small chip in the screen itself. It doesn’t appear to be very large or deep, but I’ll be getting it seen at a dealer ASAP rather than risk a bigger problem.
In other technology news, my car recently prompted me to do a wireless update at the end of my journey, which apparently would bring extra security features to its software. I pressed the icon to start the update, which took 35 minutes and, crucially, didn’t require me to either stay with the car or visit a dealer – I simply switched the ignition off, locked up and walked away as I usually would. It reminded me how much modern vehicles rely on their software – and how engineering teams like the one lead by Yousif remain crucial in shaping the future of cars.
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