Yup, a cash buyer here too... and accordingly, the bane of car dealerships since the sales rep doesn't get the finance kickback to add to his sales commission.
I'm lucky in that I've never had to consider things like warranties or such since it was once my day job a long time ago fixing 4x4's as a mobile fitter for a large commercial 4x4 hire company...and now as a pensioner and semi-retired farmer, I have a fully equipped farm workshop to get my hands dirty in these days...So it's just the cost of parts for me to keep the D5 maintained... or fix it should it do the Land Rover thing and spontaneously explode into a pile of bits.
Discos have always been my preferred daily driver since I bought my first one....they're kinda fashionably acceptable farmer's cars when wearing the compulsory Barbour jacket and Royal Hunter green wellies for hanging around the car park at the cattle market...although most of my farming neigbours seem to drive leased Volvo XC90's these days
I never fancied the leasing thing or buying new on finance, either personally or through the business since for me, it would take 90% of the fun out of the labour of love experience...I genuinely enjoy the hands and spanners on bit of a used Land Rover I owe nothing on. I bought the D5 not because it serves a particular purpose or as a fashion over function statement... but just because I wanted another Land Rover to give me the excuse to keep wearing the Land Rover baseball cap I've had since 2006.
I loved my D4 and the couple of D2's before it so the D5 seemed an almost evolutionary progression (skipped the D3 bit). If I'd bought a Volvo or a BMW X5...I'd have to ditch that scruffy old LR cap that my wife has been desperately trying to throw in the bin for the last 10 years
After I persuaded myself back in 2006 that I
really didn't need another Harley, I bought a 4 year old TD5 D2 and became a Discovery fanboy instead. Since then, I've used them for charging around rough camping off-road with a roof tent and working around the farm until they have more plates welded onto the chassis than original metal and weigh more than a Massey Fergusson tractor...
Heaven knows what I'll do with this aluminium monocoque Chelsea tractor D5 with no ladder chassis to weld in a few year's time, I may have to rethink my strategy a bit with this one
