LAND Rover’s Defender is quite simply a one-off.
There is no comparison. Where do you draw the line? What other vehicle comes anywhere near doing what this beast, described by Jeremy Clarkson as a ‘dinosaur’, can achieve.
Clarkson said the Defender was a dinosaur and the daddy at the same time and I know just what he means.
The Defender is an off-roader with the ability to get around on-road too rather than the more conventional, if a little pretentious, raft of imitations claiming to be the exact opposite.
The Defender was at home in Mid Wales. It puts the farm and building site well in front of the motorway in a list of priorities.
I have enjoyed a long love affair with Land Rover after breaking my teeth on a long wheel base model as a 17 year old on farm tracks. Nothing much has changed with the Defender though it’s not quite as physically demanding to drive these days – arms don’t ache quite as much.
Performance, comfort and refinement don’t really come into the equation when judging this model. It’s a car designed to work and it does the job better than any other vehicle I know. The excellent four-wheel-drive system, good ground clearance and strong diesel engine make it just about unstoppable off-road.
It’s very different on the road of course, bouncing all over the place at speed, and certainly not right for a long journey if you enjoy a comfortable ride.
I’ve had conversations with Land Rover enthusiasts who will tell you the Defender is now a comfy ride. Believe me they are anoraks, whose judgement is clouded by years of back pain. Modern levels of driving comfort are nowhere to be found!
Land Rover has developed brands to meet changing markets, the Defender remains almost as it always was. No such thing as re-vamps and facelifts for this workhorse, in fact the Defender is as basic as the first time it took to the road or better still the land.
There’s a new dash for the latest Defender, and it borrows bits from Freelander and Discovery to give it a more upmarket feel.
Perhaps the most important consideration is to buy a model with the Td5 diesel engine that was introduced in mid-1999. This is a much smoother and stronger unit than the previous model.
Chosing between the various models is a question of what you want to do with the car. There are short- and long-wheelbase models (three-door 90 and five-door 110, respectively), with the larger model having an extra row of three seats in the centre, giving it more versatility.
I tested the three-door 90 - a box with a hefty 4x4 drivetrain, which seats four in anything but comfort. The claim is for 28mpg but the noisy, no very noisy diesel, didn’t give me anywhere near that as the fuel gauge crashed downward at an alarming rate.
You would expect a car of this type to be cheap on the used car market but residuals are very strong with high demand.
The Defender is tough, its engines are rugged, and the body panels are cheap to replace so running costs – apart from fuel – will be lower than on the competition.
Don’t go looking for rally-type road holding or you’ll be lucky to get off the drive. The Defender’s cornering is an art. Someone said it gets round bends eventually and there is a real danger of understeer.
But the Defender is exactly what it sets out to be - a no-frills off-road machine designed to one job, and it does it very well.