I’m not going to buy it, although I will admit that I’m tempted. Had Steve Cropley not recently bought a nearly new Ford Ranger Raptor, I wonder if I’d have been able to convince him to take a look, because at one stage he was considering getting a vehicle (perhaps a Suzuki X90) to take to the Festival of the Unexceptional.
A Frontera strikes me as just the sort of car for that task. This year, an unmolested Toyota Hilux won the overall FotU prize, which raised a few eyebrows, because the model has become a bit too notable to be truly unexceptional.
This isn’t the Hilux’s fault: it was sold as a humdrum and dependable commercial pick-up at the time. But since Marty McFly had a terrific one, Top Gear couldn’t destroy one and guerrilla fighters the world over found they make durable machine-gun platforms, the Hilux has obtained a classic status denied to cars like the Frontera.
It’s not like the Frontera was considered a bad car in its time. “In most respects, the Frontera has the [Land Rover] Discovery licked – and that’s a considerable achievement,” Autocar’s road testers reckoned on 30 October 1991, scoring it 7/10 overall and 8/10 for value.
Yet Discoverys and Hiluxes of the same era command several multiples the price of a Frontera, even at the scruffier ends, and there are sky-high limits on good ones. A dealer wants £20,000 for a 67,000-mile 1997 Discovery (“a very rare opportunity”, of course) and there’s a beach-ready 1983 Hilux with KC spotlights and brown-on-beige graphics up for a gulpsome £38,000.
