About to help a customer sell one of these and got curious. They're built on a Volvo platform and use the Volvo 3.2 I6 - is it more Volvo than Land Rover?
They're cheap wholesale... a fraction of the price on an equivalent XC60, for example.
Not finding much information on them, though. Google tells me that rear differential failures are common, but otherwise they seem... pretty solid? The one ik working with has been quite trouble free for the owner over 2 years and 40k miles.
Any experience specific to the LR2? (Im aware of the quality in the Disco and RR )
The 6 cylinder LR2 is pretty good, the 4 cly turbo not much. Only thing to watch for is the rear diff as you mentioned. Most that had issues were early and fixed under warranty.
Is/was there an updated part in the diff, or should they all be treated as ticking time bombs?
I hadn't realized they had switched to a turbo 4 - those are too new/$ for me, my interest lies in tbe 2008-12 or so examples that I can get into for <$5k in reasonable shape with some miles.
Is the LR2 just a renamed Freelander?
The LR2 is totally different from the old (2001-2005) Freelander. In the rest of the world it was called the Freelander 2, but here they changed the name since the old Freelander had such a bad rep.
The diffs got new bearing as a repair.