super4 wrote:

Recently a new one (Repsol) appeared only 12 miles away but the price has risen slowly to 70 euro cents a liter.

Cheaper than France then where it's around 78.5 Euro cents at the hypermarkets but between 93 and 98 on the Autoroutes. My mate was wondering about replacing the system on his P38 for something a bit better but as he said it hardly seems worth it. Petrol on the Autoroutes is 1.65 Euro a litre but at the hypermarkets it's down to 1.30 so the price differential isn't that great. Long runs are when it would be most beneficial but that would involve filling on the Autoroute rather than using a tank full of hypermarket petrol at only 35 cents or so more expensive. He's driving to Portugal and back this weekend so we'll see what he thinks once he's done that trip.

LPG price is rising everywhere, a year ago it was only 31 Euro cents in Belgium, 4 weeks ago it was up to 50, still cheap though.

Are you talking about the dash or the message centre? I wouldn't have thought lighting the speedo, rev counter, etc would even be noticed in daylight but the message centre can go dim if it gets dirty inside.

What's this detailing I hear people talking about?

On Lo with the fans on full, you should be able to get frostbite on your fingers if you stick them over the vents. The last time mine was done I checked it with a digital thermometer and saw -3 degrees from the vents. The large pipe on mine is covered in condensation within a couple of minutes of starting the engine at the moment. I'd suspect they've not put enough in, they do hold a lot of refrigerant compared with most cars.

I would reckon your Jeep is far more comparable with a Range Rover Classic than a P38. Agricultural, and drives like it, but built like a brick outhouse. I never actually realised how much smaller than a P38 they are until I was parked next to one on a filling station.

RutlandRover wrote:

I'm not sure range is a real argument anymore. On LPG my range is somewhere between 130 miles and 190 miles

But you also have a petrol tank and the option to run on that at the flick of a switch, an option an electric car doesn't have. LPG availability varies depending on where in the country you are (Isn't there a Morrison's near where you live these days?). I've got 6 stations in easy reach, 4 within 4 miles and two more the other side of town, but others aren't so lucky I know. So far, by using www.filllpg.co.uk, I've not been on one journey when I've had to resort to running on petrol no matter where in the country I've been. OK, so some places are expensive, or more expensive that others (of my 6, prices vary between 54 and 73p per litre), but still considerably cheaper than petrol.

Unlike an electric car, refuelling takes no longer than filling with petrol too. A 10 minute stop rather than 75 minutes for a full charge from a Tesla Supercharger point, 9.5 hours if you've had a 3 phase supply installed at home so you can use one of their 22kWh chargers but to fully charge from a standard 13A supply takes the best part of 2 days!! (according to Tesla themselves). Personally I'd rather stop for 10 minutes every couple of hundred miles than considerably longer for hardly any further range (Tesla claim 351 miles for the Model X but the American EPA put it at 301 in real life).

oilmagnet477 wrote:

Is there scope for having an LPG tank at home? (Like the calor gas ones that some folk have).

Not like the Calor tanks but the same as. Homes without mains gas have two main choices for heating, oil or LPG. The LPG supplied is Propane, the exact same thing as supplied as Autogas at filling stations. The only difference is that the tanks supply vapour from a top outlet but to run your car you need a bottom feed to draw off liquid and a pump to fill the tank in the car. As the bulk gas you buy doesn't have road fuel duty applied to the price, you have to keep records of how much you have used for a car and pay the relevant duty to HMRC. It works out slightly cheaper than buying it at the pump but the initial outlay isn't cheap, you'd be looking at no change out of £2k for a tank with top and bottom outlets. I know of one taxi company running all LPG powered cars based out in the sticks and rather than paying filling station prices they have their own tank for filling the cars.

I can't see the number of filling stations dropping in the foreseeable future in all honesty. Some have gone but that just means that those left are selling more. Compared with the profit they make on petrol and diesel (a couple of pence a litre) there's a lot more in LPG. One of my local filling stations were selling LPG at 65.9p a litre, not one of the cheapest but open 24 hours and on a main road so quite popular. They are supplied by Flogas who are only open office hours but at the time were selling at 50.5p a litre. Now I can't see a filling station paying the same price as Joe Public but even if they were, that's still 15.4p per litre profit and when people tend to fill the tank that's £9.24 profit on a 60 litre fill. A lot more than they'll make on petrol or diesel.

Anyone? Or is it just me and my mate in his soft dash Classic LSE?

Should be simple enough to work out what LPG system you have by looking at the markings on the ECU. Even if the label has fallen off if you find something like AEB2568 engraved on it, you are 80% on the way to identifying it. A picture of the switch and injectors will tell you the rest. As far as filling stations are concerned, While BP and Tesco removed their pumps, Shell supply (and actively promote) LPG along with some Texaco, Jet and Esso stations and there is still the Flogas and Calor depots too. It'll be a case of supply and demand, those that have removed pumps have done it because they didn't sell enough. In the case of BP mainly because they were too damned expensive, charging up to 15 a litre more than other stations. According to DVLA there are around 150,000 LPG fuelled vehicles on the road but that is only the figure they have listed as dual fuel on the V5. Of the 5 LPG powered vehicles I've owned, only 1 was shown on the V5 as dual fuel, the others were simply shown as petrol. So in theory that means there's nearer 600,000 of them needing to fill up somewhere.

I'm with Chris in thinking electric cars will never take over. Unless there is a dramatic breakthrough in battery technology they don't have the range to do a decent journey. Sooner or later, if they are taken up as fast as some would hope they will be, the electricity generation and distribution infrastructure will collapse when it can't cope with the demand. As a town car, a shopping trolley, then they probably have their place but not as a replacement for the average family car. Think, taking the kids to the south of France or Italy for a holiday and having to stop every 3 hours to charge the bloody thing up. Admittedly I have to stop every 200 miles to fill up with LPG but that takes what, 10 minutes? 15 if I have a coffee while I'm stopped, not the hours it'll take to recharge the batteries on a Tesla. LPG is cleaner and that is recognised by some but not the shortsighted, ignorant twats we have making the decisions in this country.

France has introduced a Clean Air vignette system in Paris, Lyon and Grenoble. You pay your 4.10 Euros for a sticker that you display on your windscreen. They are numbered from 0 to 5, 0 being electric and hybrid, 1 and 2 being low polluting petrol (Euro 5 and 6), 3 being Euro 3 and 4 petrol and Euro 6 diesel and 4 and 5 being older, Euro 4 and 5 diesel. On days when pollution levels are high, only classes 0-3 are allowed in the towns. As I regularly drive into or through Paris and Lyon, I applied for a vignette for my P38. As a GEMS V8 is Euro 3, I expected to get a class 3 but because I declared that it is running on LPG, I got a class 1, only one step more polluting than an electric or hybrid. Interestingly, as you can only drive in these areas if you have a vignette, it has effectively banned all diesels made to Euro 3, so anything built before 2000 can no longer enter, even when there are no other restrictions.

Instead, here London (which is due to be enlarged next year) has and Manchester are talking about a congestion charge. Irrespective of what fuel you use and how much pollution a vehicle generates, you pay the charge. I have to drive into London 2 or 3 times a week to work and the traffic in London isn't Aunt Doris going to have a look at St Paul's Cathedral, it's people that have no other choice, the tradesmen that need the tools in their van and the trucks delivering to the shops and construction sites. But rather than it being a charge to cut congestion and improve the air quality, it's simply a money making scheme when me in my works provided Euro 6 Renault van pays the same as the shitty E reg Transit pickup I followed today belching out clouds of black smoke. But, it's always been the same, decisions are made as a knee jerk reaction to something which then proves to be not such a good idea after all. Catalytic converters were introduced to reduce harmful emissions by turning them into nice, harmless CO2 but then research showed that CO2 was a greenhouse gas so wasn't such a good idea after all. Then diesel was a good thing because it produced less CO2 but now they are finally coming round to realise that they aren't such a good idea either.

Rant over......

Pre-99 didn't have side air bags or seat belt pretensioners so no connectors at all under the seats. Maybe the side airbag an pretensioners didn't arrive at the same time?

Good thinking, not heard from Vici so don't know when the funeral is but it would be a nice gesture to do something. Shame he lived so far out in the sticks, I don't think there's anyone local that could turn up to represent us.

Personally I don't like the bull bar or side steps, in fact, I don't even like the light guards that many people fit. It just looks right without any stuck on extras. Colour coded grille depends on the colour of the car, suits some colours but not others. As for the wood, well that's more personal, you're the one that has to look at it. But I'm probably considered strange anyway, I like the look of the leather interior but it's cold in the winter and hot in the summer, I actually prefer my plod spec cloth seats for comfort and wouldn't even consider swapping them for leather.

TallPaul wrote:

I don't have the correct connectors for the seat side to replace them with....

What about the connectors on the seats you are taking out? Or just cut both connectors off and replace them with something else. As long as the ignition is off (although I have read somewhere about making sure it's been off for more than 10 minutes), or if you are really worried, disconnect the battery, it isn't going to go off. I've changed and air bag on a Merc before and it was only after I'd done it that I read that you are supposed to disconnect the battery but I hadn't and there was nothing untoward happened.

To start with you are preaching to the converted as we all own one, despite their foibles. They get looked down upon by the Land Rover One Life, Live it, crew as they aren't macho enough. The fact that a P38 on EAS will piss all over a Defender off road is something some of them know and are jealous of, others just don't think they can be any good off road as they are simply too civilised. The early ones did have problems and that got them the bad reputation as well as the EAS and electronics that were simply alien compared the agricultural engineering Land Rover independents were used to. You have to understand how something works to diagnose a problem with it and they simply didn't understand how it worked. It was this sort of thing that fooled my mate in France when he first got his. Multiple faults with the interior lights and EAS that didn't work all caused by an iffy microswitch in one door latch. Who would look at a door latch to fix a suspension problem? Once you understand how things work, it all falls into place.

But, as I have proved, look after one and it will look after you. A 3,200 mile round trip to Latvia and back at New Year, two runs to Belgium and back recently and a 2,300 mile trip around France last month, 450 miles of that towing a grossly overloaded trailer which I estimate weighed something approaching 5 tonnes. That in a 20 year old P38 with 359,000 miles on the clock that uses no oil or coolant and just keeps on going.

I've had the pleasure(?) of driving a lot of the classic cars that people lust after and in all honesty, none of them really did anything for me. They are nice to look at but they don't drive like a modern car and the same goes for the RR Classic. I owned one for 3 years, a 93 LSE so one of the later ones and while it was OK, it drove like a truck compared with the P38.

I agree, the Classic now looks dated (although the final ones with the Brooklands bumpers still look good), the L322 looks OK from the front but from the back it looks way too tall and skinny (probably why they've gone for the sloping back on the L405) but the P38 just looks right from all angles. Not only that, despite it's reputation for unreliability, I reckon it is the most reliable, it doesn't suffer some of the problems the later ones have with everything being linked by canbus so a failure of one thing screws up everything else. The L322 suffers from EAS leaks just like the P38, biggest difference is that the whole front strut has to be replaced (at over £300 a side) rather than just an air spring at a 6th of the price. It also suffers from a sticky solenoid inside the steering column that releases the steering lock. If it sticks and doesn't release, it won't even allow you to turn the key to start the engine. It doesn't give any warning either and I've seen people describe it as a minor inconvenience. If you are just going to nip to the shops it might be but if you've just stopped for fuel at the French/Italian border and you can't even start the engine, it's a bit more than a minor inconvenience.

Admittedly I'd like the 300 bhp of the BMW 4.4 litre motor in the earlier L322 (wouldn't even consider a post 2005 with the Ford engine) but I couldn't put up with the nagging feeling in the back of my mind every time I turned the key or the looks of it. Even after owning it for almost 8 years now, I still sometimes find myself looking out of the window at my P38 sitting on the driveway, it just looks so right. The only one that looks like a modern successor to the P38 is the current Sport, the L494, the proportions look right and it doesn't look as bloated as the current Range Rover, the L405.

If it's a solenoid contact problem, you will still hear the solenoid click, just the starter doesn't turn. If it does nothing at all it's likely to be brushes as the solenoid engages in series with the starter so it is turning slowly and slots into the ring gear easily. Brushes can be changed but, as Clive says, it's messy.

I think the black plug, grey plug was just to make identifying what you had easier. If someone wanted a new sensor but wasn't able to supply a VIN number, it would be easier just to ask what colour plugs it has.

It is but I'd still suspect the O ring on the heater outlet rather than a core plug considering the age of your car. Unless you've been regularly driving it through sea water or it's been run for years with plain water in the cooling system I wouldn't expect core plugs to have rusted through this soon (unless LR ran short towards the end of the production run and bought some Britpart ones......).

Not sure they are, they are a strange square shaped thing. They may use econoseal pins and sockets but not the housings. I'd be inclined to change the connectors for supaseal or similar if the originals are getting a bit crusty. One of mine may well be the same, I get a logged lambda heater fault on one, despite having changed the sensor, but as it isn't used 99.5% of the time, I've not done anything about it.