“Harsh Truths” from Autology Motors

We wear our hearts on our sleeves a little bit around here. These are more than just old cars for us. More than just investments or money or revenue streams. These cars are a reflection of us. No one works here at Autology Motors who isn’t emotionally committed to what we do. So we aren’t dispassionate about the cars or the work - we can’t be dispassionate. We take things personally. We take the work personally. We take the cars personally. Every one of them has a little bit of each of us inside it.

So with that being the case, let’s get down to brass tacks for a moment and drop some potentially uncomfortable knowledge. Here you’ll find things other companies probably won’t tell you, and things you may not even want to hear. Hell, some of these things might make you angry! They might make you think “Crikey, these guys are jerks.” So be it. They need to be said, and regrettably everyone else is too mealy mouthed to say them. So here we go…

“Your old Land Rover is going to break.”
I’m sorry. That’s the truth. What, specifically, will break? I have no idea. When will it break? I have no idea. No one does. But at some point it will break. And that is the nature not just of old Land Rovers, but of old vehicles in general. It is not the car’s fault. It is not anyone’s fault. Modern vehicles have spoiled us to the point of absurdity. We have grown to expect new (and even “newish”) vehicles to just run forever and go wherever we want them to go, whenever we want them to go there, but that is a very modern concept. For the entire history of the automobile, from the 1890’s all the way through about… the 1980’s, going anywhere by car was a bit of a roll of the dice. Cars stranded us. Tires blew out. They leaked fluids on our driveways. We used to check oil and coolant levels every time we stopped for gas. Remember that? We had to routinely grease suspensions and things like that. Hah! Imagine! Greasing a suspension! It was sometimes called a “lube job.” All the way through the 1970’s most vehicle handbooks specifically recommended “preflight” walkaround inspections of your vehicle before every drive. Yeah, man. It was exciting stuff.

So if you buy an old Land Rover? Get ready to go back to those exciting days! Every vehicle leaves our shop serviced, checked and running and driving beautifully, but that doesn’t mean we have magically turned it into a new Toyota Rav4. We haven’t, and we can’t. It is still an old Land Rover, and it will break at some point. Maybe not for five years. Maybe not for a year. But also? Maybe next week. If you can’t stomach that, and will lose your mind if your old Land Rover breaks down, don’t buy an old Land Rover or an old anything else for that matter. Go buy a new Toyota Rav4. There is no shame in buying a new Rav4. Not everyone is cut out for vintage vehicle ownership. My mom, who is 84, drives a new Toyota Rav4. (My dad, 83 years old, drives 1974 Citroën 2CV. But he’s an exceptional badass.)

“Particularly in the USA, ‘specialist’ Land Rover repair shops are more likely to be a problem than a resource.”
Ooof. This is a seriously harsh truth, and it will ruffle some feathers I’m quite sure, but I’m telling you right now it’s a truth nonetheless. I have run repair shops both in the USA and Europe, and I am acutely aware of how they operate in both regions. There are good, honest shops operating everywhere, and more power to them, but the bottom line is that any shop claiming to be a high-falutin’ specialist in old Land Rovers? For me personally, this is a serious red flag. They are far more likely to over-recommend work, overcharge for that work, and prey on the fact that their customers think they are next-level guru wizards.

Your old Land Rover is not a pre-war Alfa Romeo. It is not a mid 1990’s Formula 1 car. It doesn’t have desmodromic valve actuation or flux capacitors. The reality is that old Land Rovers are usually less technologically complicated than your riding lawn mower. And compared to something like a fifteen year old Ford F150 they are laughably rudimentary. They do not, in the main, require specialist knowledge or specialist tools to repair. They were designed to be simple and rugged, and repaired on the side of the road in remote locations around the globe. Parts, in the main, are available from a variety of sources at incredibly reasonable prices, anywhere in the world. Anyone, and I mean ANYONE, who has basic automotive repair knowledge will find themselves… “unchallenged” by working on an old Land Rover. So you don’t need a high-priced “specialist” who goes to great lengths to tell you how capable they are. You don’t need to pay 250 bucks an hour to some guy in a white lab coat. Even if he is as capable as he says, and he probably isn’t, it would be like paying a chemical engineer five grand a month to maintain your pool. A reckless waste of money and resources.

I saw an estimate recently, written by a shop which will remain nameless. But they are in New England, USA. It was for a rear main seal leak on a 300Tdi Defender. Pretty common repair. The total estimate, parts and labor, was more than $5400 plus tax, which included a clutch kit, even though the car didn’t need a clutch. But okay. They probably justify the clutch with the “while we’re in there” approach. Uhhh…okay, fine. But for the record, a complete clutch kit for a 300Tdi is about $300. The leaking seal? Three bucks. And one decent mechanic, working alone, can pull the transmission and change everything in two hours. MAYBE THREE, just to be generous. We do it here at Autology all the time. It’s, again generously, something to charge maybe $800 for. A few hundred dollars in labor, a little profit on the parts… tax… done. In and out, everyone is happy.

The estimate from this “expert specialist” was THIRTY HOURS. Fifty-four-hundred dollars. So tell me, what is the value in their supposed expertise? They’re supposed to be specialists, right? The most knowledgeable guys around for old Land Rovers? Shouldn’t that make them faster? Or better somehow? Why would such a next-level wizard specialist shop require thirty hours to do three hours worth of work? Why would they need $5400 to do an $800 job?

If you can’t work on your old Land Rover yourself, find yourself a good honest mechanic - anyone trustworthy and eager and down to earth - and build a long-term relationship with them. Someone who doesn’t take themselves or their work so seriously they always need to be puffing out their chests and telling you how incredible they are. The good ol’ mechanics are worth their weight in gold. The puffed up “specialists” are usually just looking to take as much of your gold as they can get their hands on.

Need recommendations? If you’re in the Northeastern USA, contact “Caruzn Customs” (@caruzn_customs). If you’re in the south, contact “Southern Overland Company” (@southernoverlandco). And if you’re in the Southwest, contact “Sonoran Rovers” (@sonoranrovers). All these companies sell Land Rovers, also. Just like us. They are our competitors. But I don’t care. I’m giving them a shout out here because they are fantastic companies, run by passionate enthusiasts, who are doing great, honest work.

“We are not ‘Santana Tech Support.’ The company that sold you the car should support you.”
When it comes to building and exporting Land Rovers - particularly Santanas - from Spain, we were the pioneers. Eleven, twelve years ago? We were essentially alone in this segment. No one else was doing it in any serious way. But that has all changed. Every week it seems someone new is trying to get in on the act, and usually for the wrong reasons. But because we have been around so long, and have built and delivered so many cars, people all over the world know Autology Motors. It is our name which is associated with Spanish Land Rovers. Our YouTube videos have generated tens of thousands of hours of watch time, and our Instagram account is a popular one. If you live in the USA, there is at least one Autology Motors vehicle in your state, and often dozens. If you live in Europe, there is an Autology Motors vehicle in your country, and often dozens. We have a pretty big footprint for just a handful of people beavering away Monday through Friday. But despite our popularity we remain a small company, and we keep everything very lean. We devote enormous resources to supporting our customers, before, during and after they get a vehicle from us. It’s a huge commitment, and one we are proud of. Unfortunately, other companies who have piggy-backed onto our success don’t feel the same way. Every week there are new “brokers” and new “importers” trying to cash in by buying up every Land Rover Santana they can find and flipping them. Most don’t do it for the right reasons. Most aren’t Land Rover enthusiasts, they are profiteers. Many don’t even fully know what they are buying or selling. That’s not good, but it cannot be our problem.

Every single week I get more than one email from someone, somewhere in the world (but often from Florida, for some reason?) saying something like: “I just bought a 1984 Santana. How do I turn the engine off? Please assist.” Or maybe: “I just bought a Santana and it makes a noise in the transmission. What could the problem be?” Or even: “I just bought a Santana and I don’t know what the dashboard lights do. Can you send me photos of the dashboard with the function of each light and gauge explained?” Questions about documents. Registration. Parts sources. How the vehicle functions. What year it is. Everything under the sun.

We are car people. We love these vehicles. And we love the people who love them. But we simply cannot be the tech support line for every Santana everywhere in the world, particularly those which have been quickly flipped and then forgotten by a company who wants to make the money from a sale but not do the work to earn it. Do you have a question about the Santana you bought? ASK THE PERSON WHO SOLD YOU THE CAR. If they won’t help you, or can’t? Ooof. That’s the difference between Autology Motors and those other companies in a nutshell. That’s the difference.

“An SUV it ain’t. If you don’t know what you’re buying, don’t buy it.”
There is a problem with old Land Rovers. A huge problem that no one talks about. The problem is that they are seriously fucking cool. SERIOUSLY COOL. Why is that a problem? Because it blinds people. People see an old Land Rover and they want it. They want it so badly. They want the vehicle, and they want the life they think goes with the vehicle. Adventure! Excitement! Romance! Far flung, exotic locales! Heck yeah, man! We want that stuff too!

But a 25 or 35 or 45 year old Land Rover is not just bottled romance. It’s partly bottled romance, sure, and it might have a basic body shape that is vaguely reminiscent of a modern SUV, but an SUV it ain’t. Instead it’s a seriously old off roader. It’s a cranky, unrefined, slow, slightly absurd thing that is, uhhh… let’s say “rather agricultural” to drive. So do not buy a vintage 4x4 purely because you like the way it looks. Everyone likes the way it looks. But there is a reason modern SUV’s are totally different, and there is a reason so many people wouldn’t touch owning one with a ten foot pole. They demand some sacrifices from their owners. They cannot be used like a modern SUV and no one should expect them to be used like a modern SUV. They are vintage off roaders. Totally different thing. If you buy a vintage Land Rover thinking it will be a cooler version of your 1990’s Chevy Tahoe, you are going to be hugely disappointed.

But the flip side of course, is that the compromises old vehicles force us to make? That is a huge part of the charm of owning one! That is why we love them so much. Why they become so wedded to our souls. The comparitive lack of refinement? That is a selling point to those of us who love our vehicles to have character and soul and style. But we cannot have it both ways. So just make sure you know what you’re buying before you buy it. Complaining about how slow it is on the freeway is not going to generate a lot of sympathy around here.

“There is a cost to everything. Sometimes in terms of money, sometimes not. But there is always a cost.”
There are a lot of ways you can buy an old Land Rover, or any other old vehicle for that matter. You can, for example, buy a totally unrestored used vehicle from a private seller. Cheap and cheerful, “buyer beware.” Just an old used car. That’s a perfectly legitimate way to buy an old vehicle, and allows you to get a car with the minimum initial outlay and as quickly as possible. But the condition is unlikely to be a known quantity, and the ultimate cost to make it what you want it to be might be quite high in terms of money and time. Still, this is a perfectly legitimate decision if that’s what you want.

On the other end of the spectrum, you can pay a hundred and fifty grand or two hundred grand or even upwards of three hundred grand for an absolute top of the market fully custom restoration on something like an old Land Rover. There are no shortage of companies who will sell you this, and just like the cheap and cheerful used vehicle, it’s a perfectly legitimate way to buy a used Land Rover. The upside is that pretty much everything will be new or as-new. Every nut and bolt. Everything inside and out. The downside is the obviously withering initial cash outlay, and also the multi-year time frame it usually takes to get one built to this standard. But there are other downsides also, such as the fact that a nut and bolt restoration on an old Land Rover doesn’t guarantee faultless reliability anyway, and substantial changes often complicate future servicing. But we’ll leave that alone for now. If this is what you want, there is no shame in buying one like this.

Or, you can come to a company like Autology Motors, for something in the middle. We are offering a lot of the attention to detail and customization options that the most expensive builders offer, but at prices far closer to the “buyer beware” used vehicles, and that is a combination a lot of people find very appealing indeed. Our business model allows you to get into a classic vehicle and have it look the way you want it to look, but also get something that has been evaluated, serviced, checked, repaired as needed, disassembled and reassembled, and prepared to be in known good condition and ready to drive daily. Restored? No. Perfect in every way? No. Every nut and bolt new? Again, no. If we did that the car wouldn’t cost what it costs, it would cost two or three times more. But an Autology Motors vehicle is something that was in good shape when we bought it, serviced checked, repaired and customized as desired, and in excellent condition when it leaves our shop on its way to you. Then the buyer can do what they want with it. Drive it and enjoy the heck out of it for years! Invest further and make it even more custom and more personalized. Whatever. Convert it to electric power! Why not?! The buyer can do what they want, and they have the financial flexibility to make those decisions for themselves. This is also a legitimate way to buy an old Land Rover.

Three different ways to get what you want. Three different approaches. Three different price points. All three legitimate ways to do it. If we use a Defender as an example, the cheap and cheerful used Defender may cost you thirty grand and you can have it in five days, but it comes however it comes. The Autology Motors Defender may cost you seventy grand and you can have in in seven months, in any colors you want, with any detailing you want, built to your spec. Or the ultra-high-end Defender might cost you two hundred grand, and it takes three years to build, but you get it in the colors you want and the detailing you want, plus a thousand hours or more of nut and bolt restoration work. Any of these choices is fine. The only thing that isn’t fine is choosing one of these options and holding it to the standards of one of the other options.

There is a cost to everything. Sometimes money, sometimes time, sometimes reliability, security, getting precisely what you want… whatever. There is cost to everything. it’s a calculation every buyer must make for themselves. But once you make the choice you don’t get to change the rules of the game later.

“Too many people are obsessed with how many miles (kilometers) a car has traveled, and for all the wrong reasons.”
Before I get too deep into this, let me say at the outset that I understand vehicle mileage can have an effect on vehicle condition, and I fully stipulate that vehicle mileage can have an effect on vehicle value, but the harsh truth is… it really probably shouldn’t. Not old vehicles, anyway. And not anywhere near as much effect as some people seem to think it should have.

If you’re buying a five year old Honda? Then sure, mileage is probably an important consideration. But a 40 year old Land Rover? It just… isn’t. After a certain amount of time, the only important thing is vehicle CONDITION, not vehicle mileage. If the three most important cosiderations in real estate are “location, location, location?” Then the three most important considerations with old vehicles are “condition, condition, condition.” Many older vehicles have five digit odometers, and they’ve had multiple owners over the decades. Unless the mileage has been tracked somehow since new, there is no way to verify the displayed mileage is 100% correct. Odometers may have been broken at some point, or replaced. Tire diameter could have changed. Any of these things (and plenty more) could result in the displayed mileage being higher or lower than the actual mileage. And the bottom line? After thirty or forty years? It doesn’t much matter if your old Land Rover has - to pick a random example - 100,000 miles or 200,000 miles. That kind of difference doesn’t mean anything. In fact, at just 100,000 miles an old Land Rover may have spent a substantial amount of time sitting, which isn’t good for old vehicles. Or it may have had fewer parts replaced than the 200,000 mile Land Rover, which means the higher-mileage one is actually in better shape. No matter how you slice it, a 100,000 mile Land Rover that has not been serviced regularly, has spent a lot of time parked, and which has a lot of deferred maintenance will be in substantially worse shape than a 200,000 mile example that has been driven regularly, serviced fastidiously and cared for with love and attention.

I’m not trying to say mileage makes zero difference. All things 100% equal, it does. Or at least it can. And huge differences, like the difference between 100,000 miles and 600,000 miles, obviously have greater effects. But all things are never 100% equal, and too many people get far too worked up over relatively small differences in vehicle mileage, without having any idea what the condition of the vehicle is. They may be considering two vehicles, for example, one with 100,000 miles and one with 200,000 miles, and they just flatly assume the 200,000 mile example will be in worse shape and should be considerably less expensive. Neither is guaranteed to be true.

So care about mileage if you want, but care a LOT more about condition. Don’t let low mileage become a fetish.

That’s all the harsh truths for now, but there will be others. Hah! And when we need to get real, we’ll do it here. But none of this erases the fact that old vehicles can be pure joy, even when they aren’t. They are rolling art, growling expressions of who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. They don’t just move our bodies, they elevate our moods. Old cars are like… music. Everyone has their own taste and preferences, but there is a time and place for almost any of them, and when that vehicle and that road (or trail) come together with that time and that place? It’s a magical thing. REMEMBER THAT MAGIC. Live THAT. Don’t obsess about the inevitable foibles. Live the magic. Live that attitude.

Life (and old cars, too) will reward you for it.