ICON REBORN
Land Rover’s Defender can trace its roots back to the 1940s. Now there’s a new one, built for the 21st century, but is it an evo car? We head to Africa to find out
The Land Rover Defender has been revived in 2020 – we have a go in it in Africa
I CAN SENSE THE HACKLES RISING. AN OFFroader in evo. For some it will be like Conor McGregor stepping into a boxing ring. Or people claiming to enjoy both cars and bicycles. Some readers will feel the world is out of joint, the Thrill of Driving tilted on its axis. The new Defender does not belong here. But, respectfully, I disagree. It just depends how you use it. A Defender on the road? Not so interesting. A Defender used to access Kaokoland and the world’s oldest desert? That’s a different story…
The colour of the sand beneath the 110’s tyres changes from a rich, rusty red to a coffee crème caramel and then to a Caribbean white. Almost in harmony the speed climbs past legal limits, then pushes past 130 and on towards 150kmph. The steering is light, partly because that’s how the EPAS has been tuned, partly because of the speed and the shifting surface that we’re on. But there is more than enough accuracy through the wheel to be confident in letting the Defender drift surprisingly deftly through the turns. All two-and-ahalf tons of it.
It’s not just a brief foray into this sort of driving either. We will be kicking up dust like this for hours today. The Marienfluss valley in the very north-west corner of Namibia, up by Angola, is enormous (namib, as in the Namib desert, actually means vast place in the local Nama language) and even after we have crossed it there is still plenty of distance left to cover until we reach our stop for the night. It feels like driving on a completely different scale to anything I have experienced before. It might be as close as I ever get to realising a dream of doing the Dakar, driving flat out across what is essentially wilderness (Kaokoland, after Mongolia, is the second least densely populated region in the world) with a sense of freedom but also endless concentration.
This morning the mental focus was amped up just as high but we were moving much more slowly. At times I was inching the Defender forward with all the pace of someone looking for a lost dust cap on a gravel driveway. Van Zyl’s Pass, which leads down to the Marienfluss, is the most technical trail in this part of Africa, something attested to by occasional vehicular carcasses representing a lack of care or capability.
At the top of its steepest, rockiest section, I had the same pit-of-the-stomach feeling that an average skier might possess upon finding themselves at the top of an ungroomed black run with no other way down. Aided by hand signals from outside the car, I became very well acquainted with the feel of the brake pedal and its ability to let minuscule amounts of disc slip slowly, oh so slowly, between the pads. The Defender, with centre and rear diffs locked in Rock Crawl mode, low ratio engaged and suspension extended to the full 291mm of ride height, negotiated the descent (sometimes with only two tyres in contact with the ground) with far more calm than me.
To be honest, that sort of off-road driving is not really my bag. There is a satisfaction to it and it is every bit as
CRUCIALLY, THE DEFENDER HAS RETAINED ITS ABILITY TO MAKE YOU FEEL ADVENTUROUS
ON DUSTY ROADS IT DRIVES MUCH MORE LIKE A BIG HOT HATCH THAN A
LUMBERING 4x4
hold-your-breath engaging as taking Fordwater flat. But creeping along with painstaking precision is not, for me, exciting. In golfing terms, it’s putting versus driving. However, I can also see that it is a Defender’s bread and butter, one of the areas where it has to perform in order for it to accrue its kudos and attain its fundamental level of engineering-based desirability. And if you need to get the ball in the hole to get to the next tee, then so be it. The contrast of the slow and steady also arguably makes you appreciate the faster and flowing stuff, such as the Marienfluss, even more.
Given the opportunity, this P400 model is quick too. Certainly quicker than I was expecting a new Defender to be. Under the bonnet is a 394bhp turbocharged 3-litre straight-six with mild hybrid assistance through an electric supercharger. This results in very impressive throttle response (unless you’re in a Terrain mode that dictates such a thing is undesirable) and the claimed 0-100kmph time is a hot hatch-worrying 6.4sec.
In terms of the independent suspension, every model other than a base 90 gets air rather than steel springs and the ride is commensurately cosseting. Even allowing for the tyres being run at just over 30psi to help with traction off-road, the sense of isolation and comfort while travelling at 100kmph over rough roads is incredible. This is partly due to the adoption of a unibody design rather than a body-on-frame like the old Defender. Then there is the fact that the interior, while still possessing a nicely utilitarian vibe, is much more ergonomic, no longer requiring you to rub shoulders with the windows.
And this brings me to the rather thorny issue of character. There is no denying that travelling in an old Defender would put you more in touch with the landscape you’re travelling over, both through the seat of your shorts and the kickback through the steering wheel. You would feel less detached from the country you’re moving through because the fluctuations in temperature would be more apparent, sounds would be less damped and the smells would permeate more freely. Detachment was not a facet of driving the old Defender.
And for some people that character is integral to the driving experience of a Defender. I understand that. I love old cars. I love manual gearboxes. I love being intimately involved in the driving experience. However, I also appreciate that this new one is meant to be a Defender for the 21st century and those who want to use it as a tool do not really look for character, they look for capability.
Also, crucially, what I think the Defender has retained is its ability to make you feel adventurous. Rather as the new (BMW) Mini was nothing like the old one but still instilled a spritely sense of fun like its forebear, so the Defender still has a rugged character that makes you look for off-road opportunities more than an SUV would. Particularly with the Explorer Pack fitted, because regardless of any real use for it, the ability to unhitch a ladder and climb onto the roof of your vehicle surely brings out the excitable, tree-climbing innerchild in everyone.
This sort of demeanour is largely what sets Defender apart from Discovery. Having said that, while the Disco can do most of what the Defender does, it can’t quite do it all. The approach and departure angles are much better in the Defender and the general robustness of
its D7x chassis (the Discovery has a D7u chassis) is a step up, meaning that it can take more of a sustained pounding. It is probably akin to the improvement in a GT3 RS’s track chops when compared to a GT3.
Talking of robustness, I’m relieved and not a little amazed to report that there isn’t a single squeak or rattle, let alone a warning light, in our Defender during three days of almost constant abuse. I would have expected the washboard nature of the tracks, let alone the bigger impacts on the rougher stuff, to shake something loose, but no.
While pausing for breath at one point, probably to let some giraffe nibble on a leaf or an elephant frolic around a muddy hole, I enquired what would happen if something did go wrong out in the wilderness. Obviously the new car needs its computers in order to meet emissions standards around the world and generally feel like a modern vehicle, but that surely brings complications that could leave you high and dry? The answer was that it’s capable of over-the-air software updates and diagnostics (you may need a sat phone…) but, in extremis, the ‘limp home’ modes have been specially developed so that you should be able to extricate yourself from extreme situations. The elephant looked impressed.
One thing that will stop you in your tracks is a puncture. A bit like (apparently) not hearing the bullet that kills you, you generally never see the rock that deflates a tyre, because you can guarantee it will appear the moment you take your eyes off the track. I have three such lapses, which might be some sort of record (in mitigation, I think the 19-inch wheels on our P400 mean the sidewalls are more susceptible than on the 18-inch items; or maybe it’s just me). And one of those punctures comes in the Hoarasib River, during possibly the most intense non-competitive driving I have ever done…
Even though the Defender in front is running with fog lights on, the dust cloud is so thick that it instantly obscures everything. I back off but try to keep moving blindly forward to avoid bogging down in the soft sand. Gradually the particles clear. Which way did they go? Over there. Four hundred yards away, rounding a bend in the river. But which route did they take to get there? A quick scan of the surroundings suggests some tracks to follow. We drop down off a sandy shelf, then accelerate hard to get through a muddy section, slithering this way and that, wheels spinning. Slow again to traverse some rocks nearer the bank, then plunge across the river, remembering to turn the windscreen wipers on and look out of the side windows to avoid becoming disorientated.
A big bank, in fact more of a small wall, rears up. Raise the suspension, but don’t stop. Scrabble for grip and the diffs automatically lock. Clear ground on top and it’s back up to speed. Hundred and ten kilometres per hour just as I spot the depression; the straights don’t mean you can stay off the brakes.
And it keeps coming. Rocks, sand, river, mud, river, rocks, mud, sand, mud, river and on and on and on. By the time we reach the rough, unsealed road, I am mentally exhausted. I don’t feel like I’ve blinked for hours.
Even as we travel on the dusty D3707 there is still entertainment (and the occasional threat to sidewalls) to be found. One sequence of corners sticks in the mind particularly vividly. A dozen or so bends, speed about 100kmph, loosely linked together so that you can get into a real flow. It’s clear for miles ahead and the Defender is soon drifting one way then the other. There are no big heroic angles of lock, it’s just a lift to get the nose in and then let the momentum carry the tail of the 110 round so that all four tyres are straight but sliding as you angle towards the apex. Then you smoothly pick up the throttle, drive through the second half of the corner and do it all again the other way.
From my experiences of driving and even competing in old Defenders, this is not something you would have done in the past. Sure, it would be even more fun in an Ariel Nomad, no question, but a Nomad wouldn’t have been able to tackle everything that the Defender has on its way here, and the latest Land Rover is surprisingly responsive to inputs and willing to play. On this surface it drives much more like a big hot hatch than a lumbering 4x4.
In isolation the Defender won’t be to every evo reader’s taste, and I completely understand that. But an Aventador SVJ or a BAC Mono won’t tickle everyone’s fancy either. However, driving enjoyment is so often as much about context as the specific machinery you’re in, so it pays to be open-minded. And if your driving daydreams usually consist of circuits and spectacular mountain passes, I’d suggest you add tenuous tracks and no roads at all to the list. ⌧
DRIVING ENJOYMENT IS SO
OFTEN AS MUCH ABOUT CONTEXT AS THE SPECIFIC
MACHINERY YOU’RE IN