The secret to a successful vehicle launch event, in addition to offering all-day access to food and nightly binge drinking, is scheduling events that help put the hack journo in the mindset of the vehicle's target customer. For the launch of Land Rover's heavily freshened LR3, rechristened LR4, the itinerary included an opulent dinner with his Grace, the 10th Duke of Roxburghe (say ROX-bruh), at his residence, Floors Castle in southeast Scotland. Owing to the go-anywhere nature of the brand, we dressed up in carry-on-wrinkled Yank interpretations of appropriate attire, boarded our dapper Landies, and set out along the historic carriage approach to the castle, which fords the River Tweed. Water that would have been just above knee high on a horse and well below the floor of a proper carriage lapped midway up the doors and submerged the new proximity-view cameras mounted in the front bumper, affording us a salmon's-eye view. It was also moving swiftly enough to push the 5850-pound Rovers just a bit downstream.

It's probably not for lack of imagination that no such dramatic dinner commutes have been attempted on launches of similarly upper-crusty German or Japanese SUVs...Continued