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Fabled designer Jony Ive is best known for the iconic Apple products he shepherded into being during the almost-30-year period of employment with the company that concluded this week (he’s starting up his own firm, in case you hadn’t heard), but the bald Brit also is known in automotive circles for his love of English automobiles. Ive has long had a particular fondness for fancy speed machines, using his sizable Apple salary to snap up cars like V12-powered Aston Martins and Bentley Brooklands coupes.
As it turns out, though, he also once found himself drawn to a very different sort of UK-sourced vehicle: the Land Rover LR3.
According to Cult of Mac, which says it pulled its information from the pages of Leander Kahney’s book “Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products,” Ive was inspired to buy the successor to the Discovery after seeing one of his fellow design studio employees roll up in one. “Jony wanted one as well,” a source said, according to Kahney, “and [he] got one within days.”
Why are we calling out this particular Ive ride? Because while examples of the second-gen Brooklands command prices north of $100,000 and Aston Martin DB9s generally sell for $45K–$70K these days, you can snap up a Land Rover LR3 for a song these days. High-mileage ones can be found for under $5,000; that said, considering the model’s…well, let’s say mediocre reputation for reliability, those examples might be a bit of a gamble. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a better used LR3 than this blue beauty seen here, currently on sale in Iowa for an asking price of $10,495. With 68,677 miles on the odometer, this 2006 Land Rover still has plenty of life left in it; it also looks impeccable for a 13-year-old car, from the clean engine bay to the unblemished exterior to the remarkably well-kept interior.
Granted, on the downside, it’s a V6 model, saddled with the aged Ford-sourced 4.0-liter making 216 horsepower instead of the optional 4.4-liter V8 that made 300 ponies. But you don’t buy a Land Rover to go fast; you buy one to go anywhere. Besides, going slow just gives passers-by more time to admire that design that sucked Jony Ive in all those years back.
