Spent the last week in France on holiday; the Grenadier took us there and back without incident. About a 1,000 mile around trip, so my Grenadier shows just under 12,300 miles on the odometer. Happy cruising at 81mph/130kph on the Autoroute, (agreed to phone satnav), not something I'd have contemplated in the LR110, as it would have been too masochistic.
Across the Channel via the tunnel, (my wife's a terrible sailor - gets seasick on a mill pond), in the high vehicle section, (at 2.03m, it is well over the 1.85m of the double deck cars), and the RHD to LHD headlight conversion was two bits of sticky tape on the headlights, as outlined in the Owners Manual.
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Loading was our usual "chuck it all in the back" but no issues; plenty of space for three adults, their junk and a modest amount of beer/ wine/ fizzy mineral water/ 2x flavours of Orangina brought back to fill the home shelves for Christmas.
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Arrived back at home rather relaxed to discover a full rail strike in progress. My son has to be back at work on Monday, (NHS medical secretary), so I've driven Melton Mowbray to Newcastle Upon Tyne and return today, 181 miles x 2 after 500 miles yesterday.
Conclusions:
Comfortable to drive, no aches and pains.
Great all-weather driving vehicle, except salt spray can make the front side windows quite opaque; I might experiment with wind deflectors for the driver's side window.
Fits our junk happily.
No reliability concerns; never had any worries about completing the journey, (don't ask my wife about the last LR110 journey to the same location - the last straw was having to push start the LR110 on the Channel tunnel car train as the starter solenoid failed on the evening of day one of the holiday. It's probably why there were no comments about me buying the Grenadier!)
The lights are good; with the RHD/LHD beam deflectors on, the driving lights fill in the gap in the beam, if you press the button.
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The rear fog lights are brutal! Today's trip to Newcastle was in lousy weather, (sleet, snow, rain, wind, drizzle), but was never bad enough to turn on the fog guards, (not observed well by other motorists - too many had rear fogs on when the visability was too good to need them).
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Think hard before you turn them on!
Truly a utilitarian vehicle. All spruced up ready to ferry my niece to her wedding. She is marrying a Kenyan and just spent the last month over there exploring in Defenders, so she thought a Gren was the most appropriate choice for the task. At 50kg wringing wet, the bride did not test the payload limits and even with the more corpulent driver (yours truly) and my similarly dimensioned, father-of-the-bride sibling, no legal GVM boundaries were crossed. For those of you have yet to test your Grenadier for wedding-work, I can assure you it performed flawlessly. As an interesting aside, the car has created quite a few comments, usually either "what is that?", followed by "nice Defender" and even "nice Mercedes", but to my surprise one of the bridesmaids took one look and said "nice Ineos"!. Turns out her uncle is the dealer who supplied my vehicle in a city 1000km away from Sydney. Small world.
