I used to be firmly of the opinion that when you’re prepping a vehicle for off-road fun,you might as well start with the cheapest motor you can get away with.That way, the mud and dirt and dents won’t cost you as much - and let’s face it, those modifications are going to strip it of its value.
It was a point of view that sustained me through a series of expensive mistakes involving knackered old trucks that could barely hang together on their own, let alone with a bunch of modifications asking more of them than they were ever designed to put up with in the first place.Yet to some extent, my own experience bore me out: the first modified 4x4 I ever owned was a Land Rover Defender 90 Tdi which, even though I had it from new, managed to go wrong in a variety of ways that beggared belief.
Despite this, life has taught me that unless you’re possessed of the skills, tools, time and inclination to spend half your life spannering, if you set out to build a motor out of a knackered old shed, that’s exactly what you’ll do: build it. From scratch.
Of course, for many people that’s half the fun.Actually,for many people that’s all the fun, because I’ve come across plenty who finally get their project complete then put it straight up for sale so they can build something else.
So does it make more sense to start with the cheapest 4x4 you can find, or the most expensive (aka ‘best,’ though we all know they’re not necessarily the same thing) you can afford? Most experts would very much say the latter.
It stands to reason. Start with a vehicle that hasn’t been through thousands of miles on the road and years of beatings at the hands of Great British road salt, and you have so much more chance that when you start tooling around with your shiny new mods in place, the every joint that’s now running at a slightly different angle isn’t going to react by falling apart faster than Donald Trump’s credibility.
Actually, rewind. Start with a vehicle that hasn’t already been through more or less a entire service life, and you stand a far better chance of being able to bolt those mods on in the first place without provoking a global WD40 shortage.
If you look at the Suzuki Jimny on this month’s front cover, what you’ll see is a 4x4 that was modified fresh from the showroom. Obviously, it helps if you’ve got access to the sort of money it takes to be able to do this. But if the vehicle itself is a good one, and the kit you’re putting on it is up to the same standard, a brand-new motor done this way should be as reliable and long-lived as a standard one.
Looking after it is key to this, of course, and it could be argued that the same is true of an older vehicle. But what I’ve found (and observed, with the countless owners of modded 4x4s I’ve spoken to down the years) is that if you try and do it on the cheap, you’re forever fighting fire, whereas with a new or nearly-new build it’s a case of making sure the slide towards shed status is never allowed to begin.At the very least, working on a new vehicle is just so much nicer.
That’s why, when I was looking for a vehicle to replace our Land Cruiser on the 4x4 project fleet, I found myself looking at two Discovery 2s on the same website. One was temptingly affordable: the other was newer, nicer, a better colour, on a lower mileage and, of course, a lot more money.To start with, my old instincts kicked in and I started budgeting for the old one, butthen I started thinking that investing in one that wasn’t going to be a stack of trouble from day one might actually be a sensible idea.
Still, I phoned the dealer and hedged my bets. I want to look at both, I said.
Sorry, came the reply. Neither of them was rusty underneath. So they’re both long gone. Common sense may be more common than I realised.

Alan Kidd, Editor