Features

Hitting a puddle in a car is good fun. If you're saying you've never done it, never swerved to deliberately hit a fat, tempting puddle at a slightly higher than responsible speed to create a huge flying arc of water, you're either a liar or boring.

The sound it makes is satisfying and the visual effect is even better, especially if the water wall is big enough to fly over the bonnet and splash onto your windscreen. Thinking about it, there are few better things to do in life than hitting puddles. It's right up there in the top five.

If you happen to have Internet access handy as you read this, log on to wetroads.co.uk. There you'll find a scarcely believable website where a bunch of puddlehitters have logged the existence of over 1,700 fords in the UK. These are verified by the site's creator, Lee Chapman, and the site gives you locations, descriptions and photos.

It seemed proper to attempt five of these dastardly fords in a day and learn about the Freelander 2 in the process. There is an unintentional joke here, because the new Freelander is the first all-Ford LR product. Ford. Get it? The Range Rover was designed by BMW and the new Discovery used some existing Land Rover bits.

This Freelander is Ford from top to bottom, designed at Gaydon and running on a Mondeo/Focus platform. And it's an important vehicle for LR, especially in America where the last Freelander wasn't as successful as it might have been.

The Range Rover and LR3 (Disco) sell well in the States and this Freelander (or LR2) needs to reflect enough of their glory to cash in.

That means a more upmarket, premium-experience product, one that feels and looks bigger and bolder, and one that gets close to capturing the essence of its more expensive brothers.

In short, Land Rover has done the business. This is a very good car and is surely destined for success. It has 38 per cent more loadspace than the old Freelander - very important to owners; it looks beefier despite being only 50mm longer; and most crucially of all, it feels more solid and robust on the road.

It's also quieter and more refined, and feels utterly modern, with a cosseting ride, comfy seats and good quality construction.

We're driving the i6 petrol version here. It's a Volvo-sourced 3.2-litre straight six, transversely mounted and developing 233bhp and 233lb ft of torque, and it never quite gives the Freelander i6 enough urge. It's not too slow on paper, reeling off 0-62mph in 8.9secs and topping out at 124mph, but you constantly think it could do with more oomph.