Freelander 1 How much is too much?

Almiscarado said:

Have been looking for a cheap Freelander 1, and it seems all of the cheap ones are in really bad shape.
Today I saw one with 400.000km/248.000 miles and it drove well, didn't smoke, pulled fine, no strangers noises or vibrations, no water inside, etc.
Engine had no oil leaks, no pressure on coolant hoses, only the coolant level was at the minimum mark, don't know if that might mean something bad.
Supposedly this Freelander has been well taken care of, and it does look like it did, and I enjoyed driving it (only did urban driving), but I wonder: how much is too much for the di engine? Would it still reach 500k Kms? Will it die in the next 5k Kms?

Should it buy it?! It costs 1000/1500 euro less than a 250k km Freelander in similar shape

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GrumpyGel said:

If its done 400k KMs and feels good, then its probably a better bet than a manual TD4 with 100k KMs and the clutch is about to go, or 1 of its pumps is going to pack up or leak, or the common rail sensors and complex injectors start playing up.

The L Series is generally bullet proof (famous last words) - but I would add, that the 3rd belt is as important, in fact more so as its the 1 likely to cause problems, than the other 2. The aux/fan/drive belt tensioner does fail, it throws the belt which gets wrapped round the main pulley and throws the cam belt.

Service it well, take care of the belts and the engine and pump are solid. I recon the PG1 gearbox is more likely to cause problems... and the VCU/IRD/transmission even more - so keep good care of your tyres and VCU (applies to all Freelanders).

Coolant being on the Low mark is a good sign. Most of the time my L Series has an empty expansion bottle due to the heater matrix leaking (you can probably bypass that in Portugal). Petrol Freelanders would not put up with that but the diesel ones will.

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