What's this?
The Land Rover Defender 110, proud of its brand-new body and looking most splendid indeed. Seriously, as a piece of styling the latest Landy is maturing mighty rapidly into being the most appealing model in the entire JLR stable. Without coming across as a slavish copy of the long-long-
long-serving original, the new version is nevertheless obviously a Defender and anyone who's got even the slightest cognisance of the automotive sector will be able to pick up on that detail immediately. It's hard to know whether the Defender looks better as the stocky, purposeful 90 or this stretched 110 (we always used to easily prefer the 110 but now we're not so sure), but as this is a design that can pull off sedate colours and steel wheels just as well as it flaunts bright bodywork with contrast detailing and huge, black alloys, we're inclined to say the Land Rover looks thoroughly magnificent regardless of which spec you go for.
The interior is almost every inch as good, because Land Rover has sorted the obvious ergonomic issues - i.e., you no longer sit in a Defender with the right-hand portion of your face crammed up against the side-window's glass - and given it more than a smattering of luxury gloss in here, yet this is not an identikit JLR cabin. Even without the sizeable 'DEFENDER' logo embossed into the recessed part of the passenger dashboard, you'd still know fine well you weren't sitting in any of JLR's many other SUVs. It's a beautifully finished piece of work from Land Rover, this, because it feels plush and special and accommodating, and yet it also has certain utilitarian looks and detailing (exposed Allen bolts on the doors, for example) and a solid sturdiness to everything you touch. Factor in a suitably decent infotainment touchscreen, crisp digital dials, physical HVAC controls that are a cinch to operate, and then the typical acres of space for passengers in the back and clobber in the boot (accessed by a side-hinged and hefty door bearing the spare wheel, mind, so leave plenty of space behind the Landy when you want to load stuff in and be prepared for a workout of your guns), and what you have here is one of the most desirable large SUVs or 4x4s or off-roaders or whatever you want to call them these days that is available.
Which... does somewhat make us question whether JLR needs to do a range rationalisation, given it now has ten luxury SUVs spread through its three marques, and pretty much all of those operate in the £32,000-£100,000 bracket with considerable overlap going on in several places across the portfolio. Seriously, why would you buy a
Discovery 5 when you could have a fantastic 110 in a high spec instead? We could make pretty much the same argument about the Range Rovers
Velar and
Sport, too. Truthfully, we don't think anyone would mind if the Defender, in both its 90 and 110 body styles, did the bulk of the heavy-lifting in the mid-range of the line-up for JLR. You could then split the remainder into the
Range Rover Evoque and
Land Rover Discovery Sport at the compact end, one being stylish and one being seven-seat practical (sorry, Jaguar E-Pace, no room for you at the, er, crossover inn). In the middle, the Defender could sit alongside the
Jaguar F-Pace, another nice mix of two products offering functionality on the one hand and sportiness on the other, which leaves the
I-Pace to continue as the groundbreaking electric SUV and the
Range Rover to soak up all the remaining high-end customers. It also neatly gives every marque in the House of JLR two model lines each to play with; see? Our invoice for consultancy fees will be in the post, guys... ahem.
How does it drive?
Land Rover gave us an all-singing, all-dancing P400 mild-hybrid (MHEV) 110 X to play with, which means the 3.0-litre inline-six turbo petrol plus 48-volt electrical augmentation. It also means a list price of almost £85,000, official combined economy of less than 25mpg and CO
2 emissions right up at 261g/km, all of which makes this a notably expensive machine to buy and run. Indeed, on a looping run around the northern fringes of the Cotswolds on a sunny February day (they
do exist in the UK, y'know), it actually chucked in around 18mpg overall. Yikes.
But we're starting on a negative, because it's all immensely positive stuff regarding the Defender from hereon in. Seriously,
what an achievement this thing truly is. As soon as you roll off down the road with it, various facets of its indomitable character come to light, like steering that now actually works, the nose of the 110 responding keenly to minimal inputs on the wheel, and ride comfort that's pretty much out of this world in terms of its civility. Even on Goodyear Wrangler tyres, which are not the chunkiest nor most off-road-specific rubber you can fit to the new Defender but which are still not exactly refinement-oriented road boots, the noise levels onboard are remarkably subdued. That goes for the wind noise, too, blustering around the Landy's set-square, upright frame. Brilliantly, it is what you would at absolute worst describe as 'minimal'; at best, it verges on the eerie how well the cubist 110 appears to be cutting soundlessly through the air. As the Defender lopes along in towns and on extra-urban routes, it provides a quite divine travelling experience by blending all these attributes together so effortlessly.
This feelgood factor doesn't go completely out of the window the minute you find some corners. True, there's a good degree more lean to the Defender than you might experience in some overtly
sports-biased rivals, but such roll is genuinely nicely controlled and perfectly telegraphed, so you know precisely where the ultimate limits of adhesion are. That supple damping also permits the big 110 to breathe wonderfully well with even the most lumpen and cratered of road surfaces, and there's a startling lack of understeer to something so big and so heavy (2,443kg, in this spec) that's furiously charging around back lanes in a manner old Defender owners will simply not be accustomed to at all. What we're saying here is that the new Defender is really good fun to drive quickly; it's entertaining and composed, in a way that makes it feel more fluid and organic than some of the super-tied-down, all-grip alternatives which can turn out to be a trifle boring to steer.
A huge part of its appeal is this particular drivetrain, though. Good lord, it's a peach. And if you have only been exposed to older models of the Defender, with their 120hp turbodiesels (you got the same sort of economy and CO
2 from the old 2.5-litre derv, by the way, when compared to this fresh Ingenium 3.0-litre petrol) and glacial acceleration, you'll be quite startled with the way the P400 lifts up its skirts and thunders gamely at the horizon. The inline-six makes a glorious, snarling noise, it powers all four wheels through a super-slick eight-speed automatic transmission that displays no obvious hesitancy whatsoever, and with 400hp and 550Nm of electrically infilled torque to play with, you'll not doubt for a second than the 110 can do 0-62mph in a quoted 6.1 seconds. It's completely laugh-out-loud joyous how this powertrain responds and how it makes a total mockery of the Defender's bulk, and you'll find yourself trying to make it hideously bog itself down at low revs (good luck with that) or even perform odd, quick-dash overtakes around slower-moving traffic approaching motorway slip roads, just to guffaw again as the P400 makes mincemeat of the task you've presented it with. It's a shame this engine is so bloody thirsty and pricey to buy, because otherwise we'd be 100 per cent, wholeheartedly recommending it as the go-to choice in the Defender range. Well, until that mental 525hp V8-powered model turns up soon, we guess.
Sadly, we didn't have time to test its all-important off-road credentials, but we are reliably informed by several trustworthy and impartial parties that the Defender is as imperious as ever away from the tarmac, which makes its almost completely unrecognisable on-road manners all the more gratifying. Anyway, consider this an automotive icon reinvented so successfully that's its hard to know where to dam up the babbling stream of superlatives. Sure, Mercedes has done great work with its
revitalised G-Wagen, Suzuki turned the tiny
Jimny Mk4 into something almost insufferably cute in its attempt to capture 21st century hearts, and Ford is currently trying to leverage the valued
Mustang name on an
all-electric crossover-SUV-type-thing (with not 100 per cent success, we might add), but surely no one has managed to transform something like the, um, idiosyncratic old Series and Defender models of the original Land Rover vehicle into a machine as elegant, as classy and as downright desirable as this. It is a quite phenomenal metamorphosis, one which might not please a small handful of diehard green-laners and devotees of Maurice Wilks' original masterwork, but for everyone else this is probably the most-wanted SUV of them all. And rightly so.
Verdict
The only things we've marked the Land Rover Defender down for are the following: the handling isn't quite the sharpest (but then that's not really the Defender's overriding remit); it's blinkin' expensive in this guise; and the P400 engine, as unutterably lovely as it undoubtedly is, sure has a thirst problem. Aside from that, this is an outstanding creation from all at JLR and, in more reasonable diesel format for a price nearer £50,000-£60,000, the Defender is almost certainly a five-star machine. We'll try and bring you a review of such a model in the coming months, but for now it's fair to say the new Defender really is in the rudest of rude health; so unless you're one of those people who would rather have a driving experience that's incredibly uncomfortable and primitive instead from this particular vehicle, you should otherwise find the Land Rover legend reborn to be comprehensively astounding.
Driving Dynamics
