I really liked Disco 3 and 4.
Used to load regularly out of Solihull with export loads, the model i would have bought were those sent to China, sat on soft rate steel springs sensible sized high profile tyres/wheels, NA V8 petrol driving through a simple automatic box, almost never saw this very basic spec out for UK delivery, nor anywhere else for that matter, they took off like a scalded cat when you touched the throttle.
Always thought one of those China spec models and a quick LPG conversion would have made a decent all rounder devoid of so much of the trouble causing electronic tat.
Defender i liked a lot as most do but could never own due simply to the cramped driving compartment, pick up versions in particular the seat wouldn't go back far enough, i'm by no means really tall or too bulky (at the time anyway), but what ruined LR's for me was they never put a big enough Diesel engine in the Defender, which is where the Japanese saw the gap in the market, with the 3.0 litre turboDiesel being available from '93 in UK 70 series, why Toyota didn't bring in the commercial 70 series right from the start has always been a mystery, was it a hangover from the so called ''gentlemens agreement'' re import numbers from back when the UK car market discovered with Japanese cars that they didn't need to buy the often well designed but ultimately unreliable poorly built junk that became standard UK car offerings in the 70's, with sadly few exceptions, instead they could buy totally reliable easy to maintain cars.
I'm sure i'm not the only one here who once they bought a Japanese car, my first being a 2 year old Datsun Bluebird estate around early 80's, the ease and reliability reality of owning one you never quite recovered from, instead of spending so much of your spare time fixing British and European cars, all you did if you had any sense was to service the Japanese car regularly and set about some sort of rust prevention, corrosion due to the UK salting fetish being their only weak point.
In some ways Japanese reliability proved too good, and i'm sure this is the case with so many of the used Landcruisers (in the UK at least where many buyers of new vehicles are often too ignorant or too idle to service and look after their vehicles), prove too reliable and servicing and care gets overlooked.
All of us on these pages know that if the first owners had even once a year in the spring given the undersides of their LC's a good hosing down to wash the winter salt away, the corrosion issues so many of us used buyers face simply wouldn't be an issue.