Freelander Immigrates to the U.S.

California Highway 74--the Ortega Highway--can be a wonderful place to take a fast bike or sports car if the traffic is right: when there isn’t any.

The same blind, twisting curves and steep drop-offs that make it so good, when encountered by drivers who shouldn’t be there, make it so bad--the deadliest 44 miles of asphalt in Orange County, if not all of California.

Still, if you have a vehicle you need to wring out, the Ortega is a great place to start. That’s especially true if your ride is a sport-utility vehicle with real off-road capabilities.

So that’s where we headed on a recent Sunday to wind up our week with the Freelander, the latest offering from Land Rover, the Ford-owned British builder of SUVs that go wherever they want to go and are found in every inhospitable chunk of out-of-the-way terrain on the planet. (Except, apparently, Afghanistan, where the various factions seem to prefer Toyota Land Cruisers and old Toyota and Nissan pickups.)

Near the top of San Juan Canyon, about 15 miles up the 74 from the San Diego Freeway, is a turnoff called Long Canyon Road. After about five miles of middling-to-poor asphalt, out past the training camp for the El Cariso Hotshots (a crack team of volunteer wildfire fighters), the Blue Jay Campground and the Los Pinos Conservation Camp, the asphalt ends and the Main Divide truck trail starts.

The trail winds along the ridgeline and up and down the peaks of what is often--and mistakenly--called Saddleback Mountain but is really a saddle-shaped feature formed by the tips and sloping shoulders of a pair of peaks about a mile apart in the Santa Ana Mountains: 5,496-foot Modjeska and 5,687-foot Santiago.

Main Divide is the rugged, rock-strewn dirt track that connects them with 4,604-foot Trabuco Peak and a bunch of lower mountaintops that together form the backdrop to the tile-roofed housing developments that fill the former citrus groves and row-crop fields of Orange County.

This newest Land Rover is not the go-anywhere, haul-everything piece of automotive engineering that owes allegiance to Monty’s World War II tanks and the locomotives of British Railways.

No, like a lot of those ritzy O.C. homes, the Freelander is of the new breed: expensive, high-demographic stuff with a premium on comfort.

It is a well-mannered SUV with independent suspension; a BMW-designed “automanual” transmission and hill-descent control system; and a decidedly car-like ride on the open road.

The haul up the Ortega allowed plenty of opportunity to test the Freelander’s on-road manners (more about its off-road abilities later). It stuck tight in the twisties with no appreciable body roll, a pleasant change from other Land Rovers that tend to lean over and then snap back.

In optional sport mode, the adaptive transmission had enough sense to know when to up-shift and downshift and when to hold in gear; there was little of the annoying, power-draining hunt-and-shift that is a hallmark of many automatic transmissions.

To be sure, the Freelander’s engine is thirsty--its government-estimated fuel economy rates 17 miles per gallon in the city and 21 on the highway--and it isn’t the beefiest in its class (again, more about that later). But it will tow a 4,410-pound load, and it pulled the 3,585-pound SUV up most of the hill quite smartly.

It took quite a bit of throttle, though, to keep a steady speed on the steepest parts of the climb. Though those were short stretches of road on the Ortega Highway, they would be long and possibly annoying stretches in real mountain driving in the Rockies, say, or the Sierra Nevada.

Steering, too, could have been quicker, but it wasn’t boat-tiller slow either and didn’t make a thrill ride out of a quick entry into a tight turn. Braking is solid, with vented discs in front, drums in the rear and anti-lock braking and traction control all around.

In short, the Freelander has a civilized ride unlike anything Land Rover has offered in the past.

Freelanders started rolling into Land Rover dealerships in the U.S. this month, about six years after they arrived to loud acclaim in Europe, where they remain the best-selling SUV.

Land Rover says it spent $200million redoing the Freelander for North American tastes. The U.S. version shares only about 30% of its parts with its European counterpart.

For the most part, all those new bits and pieces were put together with skill and finesse. But even though the company took six years to get it ready for the U.S., you almost wish it had taken an additional year to finish everything just right.

Among our quibbles:

* Tallish persons considering Freelanders with sunroofs might want to ride a bit, especially on rough and bumpy roads, before making a final buying decision. One’s head tends to jam uncomfortably and repeatedly into the rather rigid ceiling trim around the sunroof cutout when the going gets tough.

* The interior could have used a tad more polish. The seats have no height adjustment; the steering wheel, though tiltable, is mounted on a fixed column that doesn’t telescope to accommodate drivers of varying lengths and breadths; there are no armrests on the seats and not much arm-resting space on the door panels.

* There are dual front air bags but none available, even for an extra charge, on the sides or overhead.

* The tailgate is hinged on the right, which in this country means it opens into the curb, forcing one to stand in the street to load groceries and such. The cargo area is adequate most of the time but smaller than what leading vehicles in the class offer.

* The high-end stereo system with a built-in CD-based navigation system is positively torturous to set up. Call it a bit of medieval meanness foisted on us cousins over the Pond to show us our place.

* The engine could use more oomph.

There are three versions of the Freelander, and all come with the same power train. Doesn’t matter if you empty the kids’ college fund to get the base Freelander S with cloth seats and a $25,600 price tag; the mid-level SE with gray or black leather upholstery and a $28,400 sticker; or the $32,200 HSE with everything on board except a portrait of the Queen Mum.

You get the same 2.5-liter, 174-horsepower V-6 coupled to a five-speed automatic and an all-wheel-drive system that omits the low range in favor of a slowdown unit that uses the anti-lock braking system to hold top speed to a sedate 5.6 mph on steep off-road descents. This isn’t as good as a real low-range system, but then again most competitors in this category don’t bother to offer anything.

Most of the package works just fine and does everything you would expect a Land Rover to do, even if the juddering, scraping noises coming from the brake-activated hill-descent control unit are a bit otherworldly.

But the engine, though smooth and quiet, is the weak sister of the class, trailing everything else with a V-6 by at least 25 horsepower and 20 foot-pounds of torque.

Fortunately, that doesn’t matter a whole lot when creeping over the rocks and gullies of an off-road track such as the Main Divide.

The Freelander has just enough clearance--7.2 inches at the point up front that is lowest to the ground, and plenty of horizontal wheel travel, 7.1 inches in front and 8 inches in back--to scale most of the rocks, bumps and eroded gullies on the trail.

And on this and most other local and U.S. Forest Service trails, its length (175 inches), wheelbase (101 inches), width (71.1 inches and height (69.2 inches) make it small and nimble enough to go around the obstacles it can’t go over.

That up-and-down wheel travel combines with the Freelander’s independent suspension, offset coil springs and extra-generous fore-and-aft wheel movement to give the SUV an especially smooth ride on rutted paths and washboard surfaces. A rocky track that would loosen passengers’ fillings in many vehicles is barely noticeable in a Freelander.

The all-wheel-drive system normally keeps 70% of the power at the front wheels but can shift as much as 90% forward and up to 50% to the rear as needed. The power transfer takes place through a viscous coupling.

Final words: This is not an SUV for all reasons. There are utes that are better in the dirt, and utes that are better on the highway. Some SUVs tow more, others go faster. But the Freelander does a lot of things well and nothing poorly.

And if it is in your budget, it will get you there with a bit more class than others--it is, after all, a Land Rover.

A hint: Save a lot of bucks and a lot of frustration and eschew the high-end HSE with its maddening-to-program navigation system and headroom-limiting sunroof.

Times staff writer John O’Dell can be reached at john.odell @latimes.com.