Description
Possibly the lowest-mileage supercharged L322. Unquestionably the strongest.
Somebody spent a great deal of money making a Range Rover proof against high-powered rifle fire, then drove it around three hundred miles a year – and had it serviced six times regardless, and put it through twelve MOTs without collecting a single advisory. The threat never came. The readiness never lapsed.
The car beneath the armour is the best L322 there was. By 2012 the model had run a decade and was months from replacement: every fault found, most of them answered. The 5. 0-litre supercharged V8 delivers 510PS through a ZF six-speed, with the immediacy of a supercharger rather than the pause of a turbo. It is the engine that made the L322’s reputation and the specification that concluded it.
Armormax is the trade name of the composite developed by International Armoring Corporation of Ogden, Utah – a laminate engineered to stop rifle fire at a fraction of the weight of steel, and the reason modern armoured cars no longer need to look armoured. The conversion here is to Euro B7, among the highest levels of ballistic protection recognised for civilian vehicles.
It runs to multi-layer bullet-resistant glazing across every glass area, Armormax composite through the body, ballistic steel reinforcement, strengthened pillars, and heavy-duty hinges to carry the considerable additional weight of the doors.
What distinguishes a good conversion from an obvious one is how little of it shows. The brief throughout was to preserve the Range Rover’s original appearance, and it succeeds entirely – this reads as a black Autobiography and nothing else. Which is the point. Protection that announces itself has already surrendered half its advantage.
Sumatra Black is the correct colour for such a car. It has never been a shouting sort of finish; here it does quiet, formal work, and it is the shade an L322 always wore best.
The factory specification helps considerably. This car carries the Supercharged Design Package – the deeper front bumper, side vents and rear valance treatment that Land Rover reserved for its supercharged cars – and sits on 20-inch Style 18 alloys. The result is a car that looks purposeful for entirely ordinary reasons. Nothing about its stance invites a second look, and there is nothing to explain.
Inside, black leather with brushed aluminium and Piano Black – the Autobiography cabin at its most sober. It is the combination that has aged best of any offered, for the simple reason that nothing about it was fashionable to begin with.
The rear is executive seating, with the winged headrests that were among the last things Land Rover got right on the L322. They are properly formed rather than decorative, and they are the reason the back of this car is a better place to spend three hours than the back of most saloons costing rather more.
The remaining specification is complete in the way the final Autobiographies were: heated and cooled electrically adjustable seating front and rear, Harman/ Kardon audio, rear seat entertainment, satellite navigation, three-zone climate control, and Terrain Response beneath all of it.
Then the file, which is where this car separates itself.
Six services with JLC of Herne Hill, at 2, 136, 2, 643, 3, 231, 4, 320, 4, 347 and 4, 371 miles. Read the last three again: three visits inside fifty-one miles of one another. No mileage-based schedule asks for that. This is a car serviced by the calendar and only ever by the calendar, on the understanding that fluids degrade and seals dry whether or not anything is being driven – which is precisely the discipline a low-mileage car requires and almost never receives.
The MOT record makes the same case more forcefully. Twelve consecutive passes from March 2015 to March 2026, tested every February or March without fail, and not one advisory recorded at any of them. That is the harder achievement of the two. Advisories on a car of this age arrive through time as much as use – corrosion, perished bushes, tired rubber – and they accumulate on cars that sit quite as readily as on cars that run. Twelve clean sheets means somebody was attending to these things before an inspector had the opportunity to write them down.
It is accompanied by its owner’s wallet, stamped service record, maintenance invoices, MOT certificates, two keys and the original International Armoring documentation.
Very probably one of the lowest-mileage L322s in existence, and certainly among the most unusual. But the mileage is only half of it. The other half is fourteen years of somebody quietly keeping a car ready for something that, thankfully, never came.
