I can safely say that we've now given the Freelander TD4 HSE a pretty good going-over in recent months. Last November, Mike Grundon could be found blasting this car through sand dunes on the coast of Morocco. This month it was my turn behind the wheel, and what did I do? I got lost in Oxford, that's what.Mike's dramas were told in his road test. Very interesting they are too - far more so than the getting-lost-in-Oxford scenario. I won't bore you with the details of that, except to say that it was entirely my fault and nothing to do with Land Rover's satellite navigation system, which I have to tell you is one of the finest on the market. It provides an immense amount of valuable information without cluttering up the screen too severely, and only a congenital idiot could ever lose their way while it was being used, either in Oxford or elsewhere.Speaking of elsewhere, I took the Freelander there too. In fact I went all over the place, eating up several hundred miles of our glorious motorway network within the space of three days. This was not a personal choice. Left to my own devices I don't think I'd have chosen a Freelander for the trip, but my own devices had nothing to do with it. It's just that that particular journey happened to coincide with the time I was due to test the car. I would probably have taken something else if I could.Looking back, though, I'm quite glad it worked out the way it did. Having driven the same car briefly late last year I should have seen this coming, but I was still surprised at just how effective a motorway cruiser the Freelander is. There are various reasons for this, and one of the key ones is the splendid job Land Rover has done on noise suppression.While other diesel SUVs can be quite rattly, the Freelander is pleasantly subdued. It makes a bit of a racket under hard acceleration, of course, but on a long cruise - and also in town - it's one of the quietest vehicles in its class. The difference this makes to a car's level of comfort after a couple of hours on the road is vital, and not emphasised nearly as often as it should be.The Freelander is also comfortable in the sense that it's has lots of space for all the passengers it can be expected to carry, and again in the sense that it rides astonishingly well. If you were to travel back in time and tell someone living in the early 1970s that any Land Rover could ever cover the ground smoothly and without fuss, they would probably think you were having a laugh. But nowadays pretty much all Land Rover products do this, and the Freelander is as good an example of the trend as any of its stablemates.It can even be hustled along country roads quite smartly, considering its weight and height. You wouldn't do this for fun, because it takes a bit of effort, but at least if your passenger's contractions have started and the main road has been blocked by floods you still have a decent chance of getting to the hospital in time if you take the back route.And of course you needn't stick to the tarmac at all. Although Land Rover no longer puts much marketing emphasis on the off-road abilities of most of its vehicles, this remains one of their most impressive features. In normal conditions the Freelander is almost entirely front-wheel drive, but naturally it has a 4x4 system, and the power can be distributed wherever it's needed.Like the Discovery and the Range Rovers, the Freelander also has a Terrain Response System which sets up the brakes, engine management and traction control in four modes - normal, grass/gravel/snow, mud/ruts and, as Mike demonstrated in Morocco, sand. I'm always slightly worried about relying on electronics in off-road driving, but I've never experienced a failure and so far I've not heard of anyone who has. Let's hope that continues.This is an issue of reliability, and that has been a dirty word when applied to Land Rovers in the past. The hope is that it's not going to be a problem from now on, but the test car did have a couple of glitches. The trip display on the instrument panel faded during a night-time run (though that happened only once) and when I opened the sunroof the seal came loose and took quite a lot of fiddling to replace. These were minor faults, and they might have been specific to this particular vehicle - I trust they're not the early signs of anything more serious. Engine 2179 cc, 4 cylinders Power 160 bhp @4000 rpm Torque 295 ib/ft @2000 rpm Transmission 6 speed manual Fuel/CO2 37.7 mpg / 194 g/km Acceleration 0-62mph: 10.9sec Top speed 112 mph Price From £31399.00 approx Release date 01/12/2006
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