Styling
The Defender Octa has masses of presence as you walk up to it, mainly because it's huge. That's despite the fact it isn't available in the largest Defender body, namely the gigantic
130 seven-seater, but is only sold as a five-door, five-seat 110 (sorry, 90 fans; you're out, too). Nevertheless, it has broader tracks and greater ground clearance than any other 110, so it's 68mm wider and 28mm taller than its stablemates, making it five metres long (including its rear-mounted spare wheel) and just 5mm shy of two metres tall as well.
Yet we don't think it's massively ostentatious in appearance, despite those beautifully flared-out wheel arches that are there to cover its wider stance and which are the key aesthetic giveaway of the Octa. Aside from those and a set of 20-inch alloys wrapped in knobbly Goodyear Wrangler triple-ply all-terrain tyres (more on this in a sec), the only other Octa signifiers are the black-finished tailgate door, a set of angled quad exhaust pipes integrated into the rear bumper, and then the model-specific logo on the C-pillars - it's a little square on its side set on a circular background, the four-sided emblem in the centre being the most basic visual representation of a diamond. The reason for that? The internal structure of a diamond's carbon atoms is octagonal, which makes it both hugely desirable and immensely tough... and the same can be said of the SUV, so it takes the 'Octa' name from the gem's inner composition as a result.
If you go for the typical 'bells and whistles' launch variant called the Edition One, which gets a greater amount of equipment content for a higher price, then some of the exterior details are rendered in 'chopped' carbon fibre, sourced from the waste products of the aerospace industry (which is both ecological and cool in equal measure), and there are also some matte-effect paints like Faroe Green and Petra Copper that are exclusive to the Octa. We happen to think the vehicle looks great on the outside and not too brash, but we know that not everyone will agree.
On the subject of wheels, there are two size options of 20- or 22-inch. The former is reserved for two types of off-road tyre, either a kind of 'halfway-house' rubber that tries to be good both on- and off-road and which limits the top speed of the Defender Octa to 130mph, or the full-on Goodyears we mentioned earlier (and which we're testing here) that give the Land Rover the maximum of its immense capability in the rough stuff, at the expense of some grip, refinement and top speed (the limiter is set to a 'mere' 99mph as a consequence) on paved routes. If you want to make the Octa more of a high-performance SUV and you don't often venture away from the national roads network, then you need the 22s and their attendant Michelin tyres, which raise the limiter to 155mph and provide the greatest road-holding, but which of course will severely limit the Octa when it's away from the public highways.
Interior
If the outside of the Octa isn't a major deviation from the rest of the Defender 110 family, then the passenger compartment is even more underplayed. From behind the wheel, there's precious little that tells you this is the £140,000-plus (yes, really; more on that in the Value section below), 635hp Defender, and not simply a nicely specified 110 D250 instead.
This is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. The L663 has a lovely cabin anyway, with that pleasing mix of the utilitarian - exposed Allen-bolt heads and that grab handle above the 'Defender' logo on the passenger-side dash, for instance - with the luxurious daubings of an SUV, such as the 11.4-inch Pivi Pro infotainment system, a 12.3-inch TFT cluster and a large head-up display above it, as well as leather and soft-touch plastics and so on.
But if you're looking for differentiators between an Octa's interior and that of any other Defender in the range, there are but four: a button at six o'clock on the steering wheel, adorned with the Octa logo; glass-tipped paddle shifts behind said wheel, which can light up red in the sportier drive modes; a microfibre-swaddled headlining; and, in Edition One cars, there's more of that chopped carbon-fibre on the transmission tunnel and seat backs. What you might not spot, but you could feel if you're listening to the Octa's 15-speaker, 700-watt Meridian surround sound system, is the massaging front seats which can pulse in time to the beat of the music; very fancy, if something of a frippery.
Anyway, considering this thing can tear to 62mph from a standstill in four seconds dead, if you're expecting contrast stitching and a driving-enthusiast-appeasing steering wheel and lots of bespoke features in the Octa, you might be a tad disappointed. Yet if you simply focus on how intuitively the Defender's cabin works, how nice it looks and how solidly bolted-together it feels, you shouldn't really have much to complain about here.
Practicality
As a 110, this is a practical performance machine. There are plenty of good storage spaces and solutions in the cabin, while the passenger room in both rows of the midsized Defender is generous enough that four tall adults should be more than comfortable onboard for longer treks, while fitting in five people won't be the worst shoehorning job in the world. Furthermore, visibility for the driver is exceptional, mainly because you sit so high up in a Defender that's another 3cm off the deck anyway, so you end up looking down on the likes of other SUVs and most vans from your lofty vantage point. There's even a high-mounted rear-view camera, the feed from which can be broadcast on the interior mirror and which bypasses the regular view you can glean from the reflective glass, interrupted as it is by the rear-seat head restraints and that spare wheel on the back of the Landie.
But it's not without its flaws. As with any Defender, the rear door is side-hinged (and heavy, thanks to that wheel) so if you want to access the large boot area, you need to make sure you don't park your Octa too close to any sort of object behind the vehicle in order to do so. And that immense height makes it somewhat tricky to clamber into the Land Rover, especially if it doesn't have the optional powered fold-out sidesteps; we found this out to our cost, when we parked it next to a small hollow on some grass and, once we'd got out, the driver's door sill was level with our upper thigh. Crikey.
Performance
The Octa's monumental powertrain is, most directly, borrowed from its high-performance stablemate, the
Range Rover Sport SV - as, indeed, is its fancy suspension, which we'll come onto in the next section. Anyway, back on the motive power, more correctly Land Rover has sourced this 4.4-litre biturbo V8 from BMW. Moreover, it's a proper, dyed-in-the-wool, full-bore BMW M engine, because the S-code gives it away - its prosaic moniker being the S68B44.
BMW has supplied its engines for Land Rovers and Range Rovers before, of course, thanks in chief to its six-year stewardship of the British brand at the end of the 20th century, but it has rarely given away one of its prized S-code units before. That immediately makes the Octa feel incredibly special, beyond the fact that it boasts colossal outputs of 635hp and 750Nm. And that's all the time: in Launch Control, the latter figure clambers to 800Nm.
One thing, though, any 4.4-litre BMW engine - M or otherwise, with possible exceptions for the M62 and N62 units from around the turn of the millennium - has never particularly been renowned for is its wonderful vocals. But Land Rover seems to have sorted that issue out for the Defender Octa. It has a sports exhaust and while it is by no means as raucous as some of JLR's best supercharged hits of the past, like the
Jaguar F-Pace SVR or the related
RR Sport SVR, it makes a hard-edged, menacing growl at low revs and a tremendous shriek as it swings around to its redline. Tap the Octa button on the steering wheel for the most intense on-road mode of Dynamic, and the noise ramps up a notch. This Defender has a marvellous voice.
And simply masses of pace. The fabulous, swift-shifting ZF eight-speed gearbox and the traction advantages of the Defender's four-wheel-drive system couple up with the lag-free, potent delivery of the V8 to bestow mammoth urge on what is, at the end of the day, a mammoth car. With a driver onboard, the Defender Octa is the wrong side of 2.5 tonnes, but it never feels it with the startling way it can accelerate. Put it this way, if you do opt for the Goodyear Wrangler tyres, as on our test car, then if you don't have your wits about you, you'll hit that infuriating V-max limiter a lot quicker than you could ever possibly imagine. Fast? And then some. The Octa is an absolute weapon for either step-off or roll-on acceleration, and better yet it continues to bely its sheer mass on the brakes - the one area where so many high-performance SUVs that have come before it have betrayed their bulk. We never once wished the Land Rover had any more stopping power than it does. Which is lots, understandably.
About the only note of concern, then, comes with regards fuel consumption. But that's not a surprise. This is a 2,585kg behemoth with a twin-turbo V8 petrol, bluff aerodynamics and on-paper stats that promise no better than 22mpg combined. Enjoy the full gamut of what the Octa can do across all terrains, as we did in the Scottish Borders for almost 130 miles of arduous testing, and you'll be dreaming of 22mpg as you stare down the barrel of an average 12.4mpg. Oof. Still, the kind of people who can afford to buy an Octa in the first place can sure as eggs is eggs afford to run one with abandon too, and they won't be bothered that at roughly £1.60 for a litre of Super, they'll be spending £144 to brim the Land Rover's 90-litre tank, which'll give them about 245 miles of range at that sort of consumption level. Double oof.
Ride & Handling
A huge amount of work has been done to the Land Rover Defender Octa's chassis hardware to make it function how its parent company wants it to, but we'll skip over the minutiae to focus on the headline fact that, again borrowing from the Range Rover Sport SV, it has the advanced 6D suspension set-up. This features dampers which are hydraulically linked on opposite corners (so offside front and nearside rear, and vice versa) and teamed to air springs, which not only sit the Octa 28mm taller than any other Defender as standard, but which can jack it up on its tiptoes from there by another 75mm. Incredibly, this allows the Octa to ford fully a metre of water without recourse to a snorkel, which is not only 100mm deeper than any other Defender model can manage but also - off the tops of our heads - the deepest any 4x4, SUV, pick-up truck, crossover or whatever other types of passenger car you can think of could achieve either. To prove it, the company let us drive the Octa in a river. Or, rather,
up a river, for about 250 metres, with the water lapping up its doors at points. It managed such a request without fuss, of course.
Land Rover says this 6D arrangement gives the Defender Octa the best of both worlds, because it purportedly improves both the handling and ride comfort on the roads, while maintaining the huge wheel articulation and control that's required for a wide range of off-roading duties. Bold claims, but astonishingly we're here to tell you that Land Rover has comprehensively blitzed the brief. The Octa is little short of
staggering to drive; representing an enormous step up in dynamics from any other model in the range, the preexisting supercharged V8s included, and also coming in as one of our all-time favourite fast SUVs/4x4s we've ever tried.
As we said earlier, you have to make a choice on tyres and you can favour one element of the Octa's make-up or the other as your heart desires. So if you go for the 22s and their sporty Michelin rubber, you're going to get a sublime on-road, ultra-quick SUV at the expense of a good portion of the Defender's off-road ability (fancy suspension and the heavy-duty four-wheel-drive system of the Landie, including locking centre and rear diffs and a proper two-speed transfer 'box with a full low-range, will still not be able to overcome the limitations of low-profile sports tyres). But if you go with the 20s and the Wranglers (we wouldn't bother with the other, lesser off-road tyre choice, to be honest), you've got to accept a degree of bluntness at the kinematic limit on paved surfaces in order to be utterly blown away by what the Octa can do in the rough stuff.
However, having said that, and without having tried an Octa on 22s/Michelins as yet, we think we'd go with the chunky Goodyears. Because, even so equipped, this Defender remains a riot on the road. It has much faster steering than any other model, running 13.7:1 instead of 17.6:1 on the base models, which gives the Octa an immediacy of front-end response that's totally at odds with what you expect from a Land Rover. Lovely weighting and a good degree of feel help, but so does the massively more competent body control. While roll, pitch and dive are not totally eradicated with the Octa, they're quelled to the perfect degree, so you have a bit of informative feedback about the outside wheels loading up in corners, but not so much lean that you feel like you're on the deck of a listing ship.
That's important, when you're trying to helm such a big, tall and heavy vehicle along at the sort of demented speeds the V8 powertrain can rapidly summon up, and when you factor in the aforementioned brilliance of the braking system, then what you have with the Octa is a stupendously good on-road performance SUV that provides an enormous sense of fun for its lucky driver. Sure, in tighter turns, we managed to provoke the tread blocks of the Goodyears to deform with some brutal steering inputs and a hefty dose of throttle, finally causing the Octa to relinquish its seemingly unrelenting grip on physics and wobble its body from side to side, but it took a ridiculous level of goading it to get to that stage.
Superbly, it's not only the handling that the 6D suspension has improved on the roads, but the ride comfort too. Land Rover UK very kindly sent us a supercharged P525 90 ahead of the Octa's launch, so we could head up to Scotland to sample the newbie and back-to-back compare it to the previously most-potent Defender model to see where the dynamic improvements lie. We'll bring you a full review of that short-wheelbase loon soon (and it has its own particular set of charms, for sure), but the s/c 90 is an example of a large, powerful engine in a chassis which can't quite handle it. It's very soft and roly-poly, you see. Yet you might imagine that makes it ride better, but still the Octa triumphs - the vastly superior body control keeps the shell of the car on an even keel far more often than a regular Defender, even on lumpier tarmac, so while it's a firmer suspension set-up, it's more pleasant to travel as a passenger in an Octa at higher speeds. OK, there's a degree of subdued 'whoop-whoop' from the off-road tyres when you're at motorway pace, but even the refinement of the ultimate Defender is superb, with minimal wind, suspension or unwanted drivetrain noise to report.
As brilliant as it is on roads, though, your eyes will be on stalks when you can see what this Octa can do when it's deliberately piloted into the scenery. It has the usual Terrain Response 2 drive settings, which include mud/ruts, gravel/grass/snow and wading settings (among more) that you can select from either the touchscreen or the physical button plus rotating dial on the control panel below. There's also the ability to raise or lower the ride height here, as well as engage low-ratio and the Hill Descent Control, so - like any L663 Defender - the Octa will crawl over rocks, plug its way through deep mud, or scamper up insanely steep, rubbly inclines at a canter. The calibration of the steering, brakes and throttle response in the off-road modes is little short of sensational, either, so it means you can precision-manoeuvre the Octa without feeling like it's going to suddenly dump all 750Nm into the mix at just the wrong moment for delicate green-laning work.
Yet you want to press and hold that diamond-emblazoned button on the steering wheel. Because that engages Octa mode, with up to 85 per cent of the torque going rearwards. It also tunes the suspension for 'maximum attack', turning your previously slow-going Land Rover Defender into some sort of luxurious alternative to a
Ford Ranger Raptor. And having battered the Octa along a narrow muddy track, barely any wider than it was and wending its way through the middle of a Scottish hillside forest, at speeds approaching the UK motorway limit, we can confirm there is nothing else out there save that Ford pick-up that can do anything like this. You can even slide it about in this setting, as the steering is quick enough to catch any tail-out antics swiftly and smoothly, and it is a genuine joy to discover that the Defender Octa feels every bit as agile, thrilling and assured hammering through the woods at 70mph as it does cruising along a borders B-road. It is a genuinely astonishing dynamic creation in every single regard.
Value
When Defenders start at less than 60 grand, and the 110 is only a few quid more than that at its most basic, the Octa's £145,300 entry point is going to be a major bone of contention in many quarters. As an Edition One like this, its asking price rises to £160,800 and you basically only get the relevant branding, the chopped carbon fibre inside and out, the no-cost option of the 20s with all-terrain tyres, and the choice of free matte-effect paintwork for the extra outlay, in the main.
Octa numbers will be limited worldwide, to roughly 4,000 units annually, and of those less than a quarter have been confirmed for the UK in its first year. Apparently, the Edition Ones have pretty much all sold out already, so restricted availability makes the high purchase figures a touch more understandable. But even so, if you're going to make any sense of the idea of a '145-grand Defender', you've got to remember that the Octa is still considerably less money than the only other thing we think gets close to it in every single department of its make-up: the
Mercedes-AMG G 63. And if you want to match it off-road, you'll need that Ranger Raptor - itself a lovely thing, but of no comparison in terms of performance, prestige and presence on the roads - while to seriously eclipse its dynamic capabilities, you're going to have to spend big on something like a
Porsche Cayenne,
Lamborghini Urus or
Aston Martin DBX. And it hardly needs saying that not one of these three would get anywhere near the sorts of remote places the Octa could, even if you try and argue the fact that people who spend £145,000-£161,000 on SUVs will never, ever take them off-road.
Verdict
The Land Rover Defender Octa is one of those vehicles where you have to forget the things you think you 'know' about it - it's a Land Rover, it's a Defender, it's stupidly expensive and it's outrageously thirsty - and try and focus on the overriding fact that it is indisputably the finest thing of its type available right now. There's nothing else on sale that can even hope to match its outstanding breadth of capability in all scenarios and terrains, and whether you (rightly or wrongly) think its stellar off-road talents are ever going to be employed by the owners or not, you cannot deny the wondrous work Land Rover's chassis engineers have pulled off here. So yes, the Edition One is a £160,800 Defender. But the fantastic, amazing, utterly magnificent Octa is so, so worth it. It's one of the best things we've ever driven.
