Inquisition Frascella, Defender designer
One of the creative forces behind the new Defender, Frascella loves a challenge.
Porsche neatly circumnavigates the pressure that comes with designing each new 911 by barely changing anything. For myriad reasons, that simply wasn’t an option with the new Defender, a very different car to its predecessor. Evolution wouldn’t cut it, and the pressure on those tasked with shaping it was very real. The world was waiting for Land Rover’s designers to drop the ball. General consensus is that instead they smashed it out of the park.
Certainly designer Massimo Frascella, who joined Land Rover from Kia in 2011 but worked with design boss Gerry McGovern prior to that at Lincoln, was relieved with the new Defender’s giddy reception. Not because he wasn’t confident in his work, but because the new car was never going to be a spot-the-difference clone of the old, despite Jeep and MercedesBenz both taking – arguably very successful – evolutionary approaches to their recently replaced 4x4 icons, the Wrangler and G-Class respectively.
‘We did not consider those cars for a second – they were never part of the discussion,’ says Frascella. ‘We wanted to do something quite different. The new Defender could only be a Defender, but in truth it’s very different to the original in every surface and dimension. That’s the difference between creating something that is just a box and something that has that look but is also modern. It comes back to functionality, and being true to that in the design – a very Defender trait.
‘The amount of plan-shaping [curvature to the sides of the car, viewed from above] we have on the new car helps its aerodynamic performance, reducing drag, while also disguising its size. But to look at it you’d never guess it curves the way it does – it’s still a Defender.
‘The Defender didn’t have the luxury of evolving through generations, as Range Rover has. We wanted to deliver a new car that looked as though it had evolved from the original, skipping all the generations in between. Our job was to identify the key elements of Defender’s design and reference those, not to just deliver a new car that looks exactly the same as the old one.
‘Some design elements came naturally because of the shared attributes – the short overhangs, for example, for the approach and departure angles key to off-road capability – but we had to be disciplined. We had to capture the essence of the old car and then ignore it, which wasn’t easy.
‘Defender is so established – that image in our minds – that it
took a conscious effort not to let it permeate our thinking.’
The Defender and its Series predecessors were off-roadcapable blank canvasses for whatever was required of them, from military transport to the school run via farming, overlanding and forging a path through this planet’s least-travelled wildernesses. For its replacement the possibilities were endless, but Frascella insists the new car’s genesis was relatively linear, thanks in no small part to a focused, helpfully tight brief.
‘We could have gone in many different directions,’ he explains. ‘The beginning was the most dicult part, really nailing the brief. Yes, there was all this heritage, but we also had something missing from a strategy point of view. We had Range Rover for luxury and Discovery for versatility: we were missing the functional side of the story. That’s where Defender comes in. It’s a car that Land Rover had been looking to do for some time, and I remember the moment we rolled out the model, stood by it and everyone just knew. It was like, “Yes, this is the new Defender”.’
The original Evoque was transformative for Land Rover, a beguiling blend of strong on-road capability, remarkable offroad performance and the kind of striking, concept car design that only makes it to the showroom when a company makes the conscious decision not to meddle. Given that modularity and platform-sharing are likely to increase, Frascella believes the importance of design is only going one way.
‘As a consumer you know that the capability is there – with a Land Rover you know it can do things that other cars can’t do,’ he says. ‘Where, in the past, people looked at our cars from a purely functional point of view, increasingly they’re looking at them and deciding to buy based on the way our cars look. It is the design, and the emotional connection to that design, that they’re buying into.
‘Design is only going to become more important. It’s what will differentiate when almost everything else is standardised, and – I hate to say it – the car is almost a commodity. The offering will be similar: design will be the difference.’