If you thought £400K for the 2,000,000th
Defender
earlier in the year sounded like a lot Ineos Group figurehead Jim Ratcliffe has been making noise over the weekend about possibly investing rather more into restarting production. The kind of thing you might well consider if, like him, you like Land Rovers and have $6.6bn in the bank...
The Times
, thoroughly picked apart by our colleagues on Autocar and seemingly strenuously denied by JLR, this didn't stop Ineos director Tom Crotty repeating the intention on the Today programme on Radio 4. "Why? We think it's a great vehicle, we think there is a niche market for it," he told Business Editor Dominic O'Connell in a broader interview about Ineos's shale gas business.
While he said he understood JLR's reasons for ceasing Defender production he reaffirmed Ratcliffe's controversial assertion a lack of quality was a key reason for its eventual demise. "We think the flaw with the old car was its reliability," he said. "We'd like to make the best off-roader available anywhere in the world and we think there is a market for that."
Taking a poke at Land Rover build quality probably won't contribute to any sense of charity on the part of JLR, should it indeed be considering handing over the intellectual property, tooling and other infrastructure for Ineos to restart production in a location currently under consideration, according to Crotty. Given the investment in the Defender - and its Series predecessors - as a key pillar of the new
JLR Classic
operation it would be a surprising move. Parts, restorations and special builds like the
'Reborn' Series I
are intended to keep the original Land Rover very much part of the business, even if that doesn't include building new ones. Handing over the rights to a third party to do the latter would, on the face of it, seem a very unlikely move. And, of course, there's supposedly a new Defender on the way too.
"Defender will always be Land Rover's icon," JLR says in an official statement. "Jaguar Land Rover have stated our intention to continue the Defender lineage with an all-new model. There is nothing further to add at this time. The Defender remains a key part of our future product strategy, and with a growing portfolio of models Jaguar Land Rover is confident we have the breadth of models to meet the demands of our global customer base."
[Sources: Autocar, Forbes]