Cheap luxury SUVs are tempting. After all, a $500 Land Rover LR4 sounds like a steal, even if the listing says it does not run. The real question is what you find once it is yours.
A Florida car flipper who posts as @Samcrac found out fast. He spotted a 2011 LR4 at auction with seven minutes left and no bids. So he put in the opening $500 bid and won. With fees, he says, the truck cost $725 out the door.
He liked the odds. You can buy $500 cars at auction all day, he explains, but not ones that look this nice.
A Leak Before It Left The Truck
The auction listed the SUV as dead. So when the tow driver arrived, he used a jump pack to power the shifter into neutral. Within seconds, Sam says, he heard and smelled a massive leak.
“This thing has one heck of a fuel leak,” he says. Quickly, the driver unhooked the jump pack. Meanwhile, Sam used the manual neutral release under the cup holder, and the truck rolled off the flatbed.
Because the battery had been dead for a while, the air suspension had also sagged. As a result, he could not simply power it up to raise it. Instead, he had to work around a fuel line that leaked whenever it got 12 volts.
A Split Line And A Dealer-Only Part
Once the Land Rover LR4 was in the air, the problem was clear. The high-pressure fuel line was split. It was also loose, which told him someone had already tried to fix it once.
However, the replacement line is a dealer-only part. He says it retails for over $300, or roughly half of what he paid for the whole SUV. So he chose a home repair.
First, he cut off the damaged section. Then he bought nylon fuel tubing at an auto parts store and warmed it in boiling water. That way, it slipped over the old fittings. Next, he spliced in regular fuel-rated hose where the line needed a bend. Finally, he wrapped it in a heat-resistant sleeve.
It Runs, Then The Coolant Pours Out
With power back on, nothing dripped. After that, the engine fired up and sounded good, he says. Still, he heard a slight tick from the top of the engine, and oil was leaking on both sides.
Then he added water to the empty coolant tank. Almost at once, it poured out underneath. He traced it to a plastic coolant pipe under the intake that had split along a seam.
“It’s like you knock out one problem on these cars, you unveil five more,” he says. Because coolant was gone, he worried the engine had overheated. So he ran a combustion-gas test on the cooling system and checked the oil filter for metal.
Both tests came back clean. “For a Land Rover, that’s a pretty darn good head gasket test,” he says.
Lessons For Anyone Eyeing A Cheap Land Rover LR4
- Assume a dead car has more than one problem. Fixing the first one may reveal the next.
- Never power up a car with a known fuel leak in a closed space. Find the leak first.
- Check the coolant level before starting. Running without coolant can ruin an engine.
- Test for head gasket trouble and check the oil filter. Both are cheap ways to avoid a costly surprise.
- Make sure replacement parts fit your exact engine. A similar engine may use different pipes.
Where Things Stand
So far, Sam says, the fuel line repair cost about $30. However, the $70 metal coolant pipe kit he bought did not fit, so he ordered other parts. The bigger job is the oil leak. To reach the valve covers, he must pull all eight fuel injectors. If they break, he warns, he could spend three times what the Land Rover LR4 cost.
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