Land Rover Defender Iconic 4x4 is reborn as a more versatile premium SUV that still likes the rough stuff
Reborn 4x4 promises to be the most capable vehicle that Land Rover has ever made, both on and off the road On sale Now Price from £45,560
IF YOU’VE SEEN the movie Fight Club, you might recall a scene where the main protagonist, played by Edward Norton, and his side-kick (Brad Pitt) take great pleasure in smashing up a then-new 1998 Volkswagen Beetle. It’s a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ moment, but it’s significant, as Norton later explains: “We smash it… because it seemed like the classic example of a baby-boomer-generation marketing plan that sold culture back to us.”
It’s a clever metaphor but, on a more basic level, it shows how tricky it can be to reinvent an automotive icon. Manufacturers must walk a very fine line between paying respect to the original product and not producing a pastiche.
Land Rover has thought long and hard about that with the car you see here: the all-new
Defender. After all, how do you improve on a car that was as beloved by mountain rescue teams as it was urban hipsters? Well, according to Land Rover, you leave no room for criticism and make it more practical, more refined and more capable off road than the car it replaces. This is a car developed by engineers who want to achieve success in both style and substance.
Under the skin, the new Defender is closely related to the current Land Rover Discovery, so that means no off-road-biased separate chassis or rigid axles. However, the suspension has been reinforced (longer 110 models have air suspension as standard, while the shorter three-door 90 gets regular steel springs, with air as an option), so the new Defender has more suspension travel and ground clearance than its sibling. Items such as the battery, electrics and spare wheel have been positioned to give better approach and departure angles as well.
But Land Rover doesn’t just want to make a car that’s more capable than the competition; it wants to make it easier to drive, too. So, like the Discovery, the Defender has a clever Terrain Response system that allows the driver to optimise the car for different surfaces, a virtual wade depth sensor that tells you when you’re approaching its 900mm maximum, and a system called Clearsight Ground View, which displays the area under the bonnet and ahead of the front wheels on a dashboardmounted screen.
Engine options are far more straightforward. Buyers have the choice of 2.0-litre diesels with 197bhp or 237bhp, a 2.0-litre petrol with 296bhp and a 3.0-litre V6 with 396bhp, all with an eight-speed automatic gearbox. A plug-in hybrid will be available later this year.
However, don’t go thinking you’ll just whizz through Land Rover’s online configurator. The
8 May 2020
number of personalisation options on the new Defender is simply mind-boggling, the idea being that you can spec your own car to suit how you’re going to use it. There are four design packs alone and you can even have an electric winch and painted steel wheels, should you feel the need to prove to your neighbours that you’re an adventurous type.
So far, we’ve tried what Land Rover thinks will be the most popular model: the D240, with a 237bhp 2.0-litre diesel engine that suits the car’s character perfectly. It isn’t particularly quick – 0-62mph takes 9.2sec – but the engine has plenty of low-rev muscle and gains speed impressively enough once up and running.
The eight-speed gearbox is less impressive, exhibiting a tendency to shuffle down the gears unnecessarily at the merest brush of the accelerator. We’d prefer it to make use of the engine’s impressive 317lb ft of pull to haul the car along. However, this can be overcome by selecting gears yourself in manual mode.
Do so and the Defender is enjoyable to guide down a flowing country road. The steering doesn’t provide you with a lot of ‘feel’, but it’s light and accurate, so it’s easy to place the car exactly where you want it, and although the body does lean a bit if you hoof the car in to a corner, it is beautifully controlled in its movements, giving you plenty of confidence. More road-biased SUVS, such as the Audi Q7 and BMW X5, are sharper still, but compared with cars of a similar level of off-road ability (such as the Jeep Wrangler and Toyota Land Cruiser), the Defender is in another league.
The same goes for comfort. Even though our test car had optional off-road tyres, the Defender’s air suspension did a brilliant job of taking the sting out of larger urban abrasions, with the body shuddering far less than the larger Discovery’s. And although the Defender may look like it has the aerodynamics of a brick, wind noise at motorway speeds is >>
‘Guiding the Defender along a owing country road is an enjoyable experience’