I've owned my beloved Rangie for over 5 years now and despite my relative lack of ability to do major work myself, I have learned a lot about the P38 over the years and my DIY skills certainly improved during ownership, although heavy work I can't do. The driving pleasure has been immense, the reliability excellent and now that she's 10 years old, 99% of the niggles have been sorted. I have had to move on to another 4x4 - in my case, an X5 - but still can't bear the idea of selling the Rangie, which is still sitting on my drive and in fact, had to jump start the X5 last weekend when the Xes battery died in the big freeze.
Would I recommend a P38 to anyone - yes, but with the reservation that repairs and maintenance ARE expensive, and can end in disaster, like a chap on this forum a few months back, who was really done over with a complete lemon of a P38, and went through hell and back with it before giving up. The P38s are all getting old now - and very well maintained ones are harder and harder to find as are those which have only had one or two owners. A lot of dodgy rubbish ends up on ebay and lots of forum posts are about mega problems as people don't tend to post about happy driving experiences.
There are also doubts about LPG conversions - many people have them, save a lot of money, and think they are wonderful, but the other side of the coin is that they can be very troublesome and many feel that due to the low tolerance of the V8 for high temperatures, LPG conversions can cause engine failures / slipped liners / cracked blocks etc as they run hotter than petrol. I resisted the urge to convert my Rangie and she is still purring away happily at 132K and runs sweet as a nut. Upgraded shocks to Konis at each end, added Magnecor leads, change oil every 6000 miles and only ever use BP Ultimate and I've never had a breakdown. The airbags gave a few problems in the past which were sorted when they were replaced, and my aircon condensor has been replaced 3x in 5 years - leaves stuck between grille and condensor cause corrosion. Blend motors were replaced as was HEVAC panel so aircon is 100% and new head gaskets done about 18 months ago after the indy spotted an oil leak from one of them. A brake line had corroded and was replaced for newest MOT and the manifold replaced with a second hand unit as it was blowing from a slight crack. Other than that, just the usual tyres, brakes and servicing consumables, although it is still expensive to run compared to a small car. Beware of P38s with little or no history, make sure you get two working key fobs (they are very expensive and cannot be bought on ebay!) AND the EKA code AND the radio code AND the manuals AND the sun roof manual closing tool AND the toolkit with wheel lock key!! If the car has had a decent owner, all these will be with it, as well as a reasonable service hisotry. The V8 likes frequent oil changes and will collapse prematurely if constantly abused and not cared for.
That's my view as a female P38 owner for the past 5+ years .........
BTW, while looking into other 4x4 options, I discovered that none of them were free from any problems - the ML is hugely expensive to fix and extremely boring to drive, the Touareg is a nice car but again a lot of reliability issues reported, odd though it may be for a VW, Volvo XC90s featured on Watchdog with electrical failures and spontaneous bursting into flames, Japanese 4x4S generally very reliable - Nissan (I had a Patrol which had done over 300 000K when I partexed it for the Rangie and only ever had one clutch plate and an oil pump in the 7 years I owned it, apart from its services and consumables / tyres etc.) Toyotas much the same for reliability. But none of them have that quirky quintessetial British feel to them like the Rangie.......I've really loved driving and owning mine, despite the high cost of maintaining her to a high standard. If you can afford it, go for it.
