RE: 2020 Land Rover Defender - first sighting!
Discussion
To change the subject a tiny bit. Most people recognise that almost no one who can afford £40k+ cars lives away from roads that an ordinary car can happily drive on (you only need to spend a little bit of time in the third world to note that locals can get any car down any road). And that it isn’t remotely logical for a relatively niche, premium, lower volume manufacturer to try and compete against the big, mass volume modern work horse builders or that the reliability is too often used to mask the real dislike.
As such, what would be the logical features of a base model aimed at people who aren’t fitting the norm of just using a car to commute in clean clothes from home to office or shops in the urban/suburban environment?
I would think that being able to specify one without carpets, with vinyl equivalent cloth, manually operated seats and cleared load space etc would be quite useful for consumers who would like a LR product but want to be able to climb in all muddy and sling mucky kit in?
As such, what would be the logical features of a base model aimed at people who aren’t fitting the norm of just using a car to commute in clean clothes from home to office or shops in the urban/suburban environment?
I would think that being able to specify one without carpets, with vinyl equivalent cloth, manually operated seats and cleared load space etc would be quite useful for consumers who would like a LR product but want to be able to climb in all muddy and sling mucky kit in?
DonkeyApple said:
To change the subject a tiny bit. Most people recognise that almost no one who can afford £40k+ cars lives away from roads that an ordinary car can happily drive on (you only need to spend a little bit of time in the third world to note that locals can get any car down any road). And that it isn’t remotely logical for a relatively niche, premium, lower volume manufacturer to try and compete against the big, mass volume modern work horse builders or that the reliability is too often used to mask the real dislike.
As such, what would be the logical features of a base model aimed at people who aren’t fitting the norm of just using a car to commute in clean clothes from home to office or shops in the urban/suburban environment?
I would think that being able to specify one without carpets, with vinyl equivalent cloth, manually operated seats and cleared load space etc would be quite useful for consumers who would like a LR product but want to be able to climb in all muddy and sling mucky kit in?
This! But I worry about the new market for this buying group. I haven't had a Land Rover for a while. I have used them in anger a fair bit especially overseas. For me I am sure that most "Proper" 4x4s could do everything I want in terms of off rosding and far more, without the extreme live axle etc. As such, what would be the logical features of a base model aimed at people who aren’t fitting the norm of just using a car to commute in clean clothes from home to office or shops in the urban/suburban environment?
I would think that being able to specify one without carpets, with vinyl equivalent cloth, manually operated seats and cleared load space etc would be quite useful for consumers who would like a LR product but want to be able to climb in all muddy and sling mucky kit in?
What I had mine for was something that did the off road bad weather thing but mostly that I could just not worry about dents scratches and muck inside and out. I also wanted to be able to park it for 2 or 3 days in a remote rural area and not worry about it getting broken into or stolen.
The last one became more of a concern, as tine went on, as prices started to rise.
What the Defender had over the other utility rivals was an image that meant that it was also OK with wives and family. But most of all, given the low mileage I did, it appreciating in value made financial sense.
Well it appears the new one is really going going to be a Disco 3 replacement in terms of looks, with some Defender cues thrown in & as its on the same platform as the current disco it so will drive well, do all the 4x4ing rather well if not better by the looks of the overhangs, it comes in all three sizes 90/110/130.
I see it as an upcoming huge success in terms of sales, though I see it taking away disco4 sales & watering down the sales of all the other models. No doubt it will have a huge envelope of models/specs/variants eg coils/air suspension, all 3.5ton towing, a billy basic commercial to a full luxury spec & even SVR models.
If they could build them to be reliable I'd quite like one
I see it as an upcoming huge success in terms of sales, though I see it taking away disco4 sales & watering down the sales of all the other models. No doubt it will have a huge envelope of models/specs/variants eg coils/air suspension, all 3.5ton towing, a billy basic commercial to a full luxury spec & even SVR models.
If they could build them to be reliable I'd quite like one
DonkeyApple said:
To change the subject a tiny bit. Most people recognise that almost no one who can afford £40k+ cars lives away from roads that an ordinary car can happily drive on (you only need to spend a little bit of time in the third world to note that locals can get any car down any road). And that it isn’t remotely logical for a relatively niche, premium, lower volume manufacturer to try and compete against the big, mass volume modern work horse builders or that the reliability is too often used to mask the real dislike.
As such, what would be the logical features of a base model aimed at people who aren’t fitting the norm of just using a car to commute in clean clothes from home to office or shops in the urban/suburban environment?
I would think that being able to specify one without carpets, with vinyl equivalent cloth, manually operated seats and cleared load space etc would be quite useful for consumers who would like a LR product but want to be able to climb in all muddy and sling mucky kit in?
I fit into this market. For those who don’t want / need a pick up (I don’t, they are too big for narrow tracks / lanes), you can get a Land Cruiser Utility (still big but SWB). Personally, I’ve found the best all round vehicle to be Subaru (Forester in my case). Very tough, dependable, not too big, good ground clearance (only 20mm less than the LC), excellent 4WD system for the fields, tracks etc (must fit A/T’s), comfortable and refined enough for long journeys if required at 45mpg. It’s generally filthy, driven in muddy wellies, all sorts of kit, chainsaws, shotguns etc chucked in the back. For this type of environment, I can’t find anything better. I’ve looked at everything. Sure, if you want to go proper off-roading you need a LC or Hi-Lux but for all round use in this type of environment, Subaru takes some beating. As such, what would be the logical features of a base model aimed at people who aren’t fitting the norm of just using a car to commute in clean clothes from home to office or shops in the urban/suburban environment?
I would think that being able to specify one without carpets, with vinyl equivalent cloth, manually operated seats and cleared load space etc would be quite useful for consumers who would like a LR product but want to be able to climb in all muddy and sling mucky kit in?
powerstroke said:
NomduJour said:
You people need to step away from the internet - the only time I’ve ever been let down by a Land Rover product was my own fault. Why on earth would I buy a demonstrably inferior vehicle because people on the internet (who have generally never sat in either) tell me they’re magically unbreakable?
The cult of Landrover , I have personally sat on the hard shoulder of the M40 watching my Range Rover burn and on a mountainside in Scotland awaiting recovery from the failure to proceed brought about by a tennis ball sized hole in the transfer box after it exploded spectacularly. I can't even begin to list the levels of failure other people I know have suffered. Defenders brought owners to the end of their tether - one came to the factory and threatened to set himself and the car on fire at the gates unless his car was looked at. Another blocked the gates on a Friday lunchtime with a yacht he towed behind his Defender 130 that had spent more time in the dealership than he had driving it demanding the same thing.
Not saying that other cars don't have issues or that Landcruisers defy the logic that "all machines break it's just a case of when" but it isn't hyperbole to say that Land Rover has made some that are worse than most.
troika said:
I fit into this market. For those who don’t want / need a pick up (I don’t, they are too big for narrow tracks / lanes), you can get a Land Cruiser Utility (still big but SWB). Personally, I’ve found the best all round vehicle to be Subaru (Forester in my case). Very tough, dependable, not too big, good ground clearance (only 20mm less than the LC), excellent 4WD system for the fields, tracks etc (must fit A/T’s), comfortable and refined enough for long journeys if required at 45mpg. It’s generally filthy, driven in muddy wellies, all sorts of kit, chainsaws, shotguns etc chucked in the back. For this type of environment, I can’t find anything better. I’ve looked at everything. Sure, if you want to go proper off-roading you need a LC or Hi-Lux but for all round use in this type of environment, Subaru takes some beating.
It’s pretty hard to beat a Forester as a family hack that covers so many bases. It’s just one of those cars that works on so many levels. 2xChevrons said:
The Defender has no market. Its market as a utility vehicle was gone by 1985
Thanks for all that info. 
You could well be right. For me there are two points.
Firstly, I wonder if the fact that the Defender seemed to have pretty much 'sat on its hands' for years before '85, made it already significantly obsolete by that time, rather than there not being a market.
Secondly, in recent times interest in the Defender seems to have ballooned, with the 'Works', 'Twisted', Startech etc.
Obviously we've not even seen the new car but for me I still think the Defender needs to be a good few degrees closer to 'roughty toughty' than to 'On road comfort', since the latter they have sewn up in about half a dozen different varieties..
(This will be a tough sell on here I know..
) Fire99 said:
I wonder if the fact that the Defender seemed to have pretty much 'sat on its hands' for years before '85, made it already significantly obsolete by that time, rather than there not being a market.
As a utility vehicle with worldwide appeal, the “Defender” was effectively over by the time the Series III was introduced - BL didn’t invest in it to keep up with the competition - it was underpowered, weak-axled, old fashioned, even then.DonkeyApple said:
It’s pretty hard to beat a Forester as a family hack that covers so many bases. It’s just one of those cars that works on so many levels.
It’s interesting, my previous Subaru dealer also had a LR franchise (got rid of it now). He said their typical Subaru customer could buy any new LR/RR they wanted, but wouldn’t think of it. Many were previous LR owners who just got fed up with them not working. On the flip side, folk coming in to buy their first shiny new LR/RR would never buy a Subaru. I mean, come on, how could they possibly lower themselves! Their £500 a month can get them into the green oval! Fire99 said:
Thanks for all that info.
You could well be right. For me there are two points.
Firstly, I wonder if the fact that the Defender seemed to have pretty much 'sat on its hands' for years before '85, made it already significantly obsolete by that time, rather than there not being a market.
Not really. As a design the Series III Land Rover (1971-1985, which 'oversaw' the collapse in the Landy's global market) was no real different to the contemporary Land Cruiser or Patrol. They were all ladder-framed utility vehicles with leaf-sprung beam axles, selectable four-wheel drive and versatile boxy bolt-together bodies with very little in the way of comfort or equipment. All were available with various engines, wheelbases and body styles. You could well be right. For me there are two points.
Firstly, I wonder if the fact that the Defender seemed to have pretty much 'sat on its hands' for years before '85, made it already significantly obsolete by that time, rather than there not being a market.
There were flaws with the Land Rover design, all inherited from its origins as a stop-gap product made from a lash-up of 1930s Rover saloon car parts. The LR has 'sacrificial' half-shafts - the design of the rear hubs mean that you can remove the half-shaft without jacking up the vehicle so they're easy to change. Rover therefore designed the shaft as the weakest point of the car-derived axle so it shears when over-stressed. This gave Land Rovers a reputation for weak axles that they still hold in many parts of the world. Toyota and Nissan just built axles strong enough for the job all the way through.
Right through to the introduction of the 200Tdi in 1990, Land Rover struggled with offering a decent engine. The standard options were 2.25-litre 4-cylinder petrol and diesel, which were fine for the British countryside but underpowered for heavily-laden utility work in more rugged bits of the world. The 109-inch models could be had with a 2.6 straight-6 from the Rover P4 which was lovely, smooth and torquey but not really up to the job and of an odd design that needed a lot of maintenance. Even the Rover V8 wasn't really right - too highly-strung and too thirsty. By contrast Toyota offered a choice of 3.4- or 3.9-litre six-pots from the very start, the smallest engine you could get in the famous 40-Series was a 3.0-litre six-pot diesel and it went up to a 4.2-litre. The Patrol had similar options - all big, understressed, powerful truck-derived units that were actually up to the job that the vehicles were sold for and offered much better on-road performance than the Land Rover.
There was also the issue of quantity and quality. Rover had one factory in the West Midlands (which also built cars) plus a few license-building operations. The CKD operations, such as the crucial one in Australia, were dependant on kits of parts being shipped from Solihull. Both of these limited the number of Land Rovers that could be built each year - the peak was 56,663 in 1970/71. Rover was a small company when independent and didn't have the resources to invest in expanding LR capacity, while British Leyland didn't have the time or ability to do so, even if it should have. Even when Land Rover held 90 per cent of the 4x4 market in Australia there was still a waiting list of six months to buy one, simply because Solihull couldn't ship enough kits across the world, and the operation in Sydney couldn't screw them together, fast enough.
By contrast Toyota was churning out over 80,000 Land Cruiser 40-Series each year by 1970 in multiple factories. Toyota knew that the Land Cruiser was a key to global success and it was one of the first designs for which all the Toyota production and quality standard controls that we all know today were implemented on. 1960s Land Rovers are actually pretty-well made but they are still built with all the assumptions that ruled the car industry before the Japanese changed things - the idea that if you build a car with seven housings holding oil, at least some of them will inevitably leak, or that if you're buying a vehicle designed to tow 3.5 tons then a nasty, heavy, stubborn gearbox is just par for the course because it's too difficult to design one that's both strong and easy to use, or that there's nothing wrong with expecting owners to adjust the valve clearances every 3000 miles and it's a job that requires three different sizes of spanner. Land Cruisers (and Patrols, Jimnys, Mitsubishi J-Series etc.) were both designed and built to much higher standards in detail than anything from Land Rover or anywhere else, just as Mk1 Honda Civic is to a Mini.
By contrast in the 1970s the Land Rover's quality plummeted thanks to chaos, poor management and intrasigent workers throughout the production chain, settling for increasingly poor-quality materials, tooling that was wearing out and an inability to so anything about it due to the large-scale crises at British Leyland. As soon as Land Rover was seperated from Rover and given £230 million of its own money in 1979 then they very quickly introduced all the changes that people had been requesting for about 20 years - 24-spline axles (which solved the half-shaft issue), stronger and quieter C-Suffix gearboxes, five-bearing cranks on the 2.25 engines, the V8 replaces the ancient 2.6 six-pot, uprated brakes with standard-fit servo assistance, better sound-deadening and new bodies like the High Capacity Pick-Up and County Station Wagon. Build quality was also massively improved and 1981-1985 Series IIIs are up there with pre-1969 Series IIAs for durability.
But as other posters have said the thing that really killed the Land Rover was a combination of politics and economics. The early-1980s recession and the monetarist policies of the Thatcher government raised the exchange rate which made the Land Rover suddenly far more expensive than was reasonable in most of its global markets. Incidentally this was the same force which killed MG - for all its issues the MGB and Midget had been modestly and consistently profitable throughout the 1970s, with sales actually on a slight upward trend going into the 1980s. Then the exchange rate switched (especially pound:dollar) and suddenly the entire operation became unviable and Abingdon (the most efficient and harmonious factory in the entire BL edifice, with by far the best build quality) was shut with a year's notice.
The Latin American Debt Crisis wiped out some of Land Rover's key civilian and military buyers which had, as yet, been largely unassailed by the Japanese manufacturers. By the early 1980s Britain's economic and political ties to sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and even Australasia had all loosened. We were no longer an imperial power and our political shift away from the wider world and into Europe, plus our politico-economic issues at home, meant that we weren't throwing money around in the developing world as we did in the 1960s, where a lot of orders for Land Rovers came on the back of "you want a loan to build this hydro-electric dam/highway/port/power station? You have to buy Land Rovers to do the work." The same went for military buyers - the world was becoming increasingly split between the US and the USSR with fewer nations feeling the need to buy Land Rovers out of neccessity, obligation or lingering colonial tradition. The overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979 also removed one of the single biggest Land Rover buyers, as well as a once-lucrative CKD operation (which carried on but now unlicensed so Solihull never saw a penny from any of the 'Land Rover' sales in Iran).
The annual sales figures look like this:
1977 - 41,452
1978 - 46,172
1979 - 42,936
1980 - 51,198
1981 - 41,059
1982 - 38,926
1983 - 28,586
1984 - 25,562
1985- 31,046
1986 - 22,026
Given that even in its 'glory years' the Land Rover was selling in high-40k, it's not really the case that the Land Rover was wiped out by the Land Cruiser in the 1970s. It was killed by wider economic forces which forced LR to retreat to the lower-volume/higher-profit market of the Range Rover (and later Discovery). This opened the door for the Japanese (largely unaffected by the same economic and political forces) to surge into the gap and once these markets experienced what Toyota, Nissan et.al had to offer they had no desire to go back to Land Rover even if Solihull had the will to do anything about it. Which applies now as much as it did in 1985.
Fire99 said:
Secondly, in recent times interest in the Defender seems to have ballooned, with the 'Works', 'Twisted', Startech etc.
Note that these are all meeting a demand for the Defender in a 'fashion accessory that Clarkson put in the Sub Zero section of the Cool Wall sense'. Basically what Mercedes have (very successfully) turned the G-Wagen into. That ballooning interest is from rich people in the West/Far East who really ==want== a Defender but in no way actually ==need== one. Oh look, a Land Rover Discovery! I really hope this isn't the sell out of a name that it is destined to be.
Hopefully Land Rover prove me wrong and make it just as capable however, the Defender legend is unlikely to continue with this latest guise.
I'd have a used Defender if low mileage examples weren't still so high although, good investment...
Hopefully Land Rover prove me wrong and make it just as capable however, the Defender legend is unlikely to continue with this latest guise.
I'd have a used Defender if low mileage examples weren't still so high although, good investment...
One thing the old Defender has, that no competitor has, is a certain heroic quality.
A quality born of looking like it is the real thing, like you could, if you wanted to, drive it straight across the Darien Gap.
This was demonstrated to me a few weeks ago when a Los Angeles TV production company contacted me about a documentary they wanted to film. They needed some footage of their hero driving along jungle trails and wanted to get some ATVs to splash through rivers, etc.
I sent them a few photos of my trusty muddy Defender and they were like (LA speak) oh my gard, that is sooo cool! They had never seen one before. But they instantly forgot the ATVs, fitted my Defender with camera gear, and off we went.
A Toyota no matter how reliable would never have cut it.
The new Defender needs to have the same qualities.
A quality born of looking like it is the real thing, like you could, if you wanted to, drive it straight across the Darien Gap.
This was demonstrated to me a few weeks ago when a Los Angeles TV production company contacted me about a documentary they wanted to film. They needed some footage of their hero driving along jungle trails and wanted to get some ATVs to splash through rivers, etc.
I sent them a few photos of my trusty muddy Defender and they were like (LA speak) oh my gard, that is sooo cool! They had never seen one before. But they instantly forgot the ATVs, fitted my Defender with camera gear, and off we went.
A Toyota no matter how reliable would never have cut it.
The new Defender needs to have the same qualities.
True. There will always be something about the Landie that others never came close to having. Probably why most of the later ones were just bought by chaps living in town wanting something that just put a pure smile on their face when pottering down mundane city streets. Although it was a Rangie that went through the Gap. And it was mostly carried and dragged by some squaddies. We could talk about how they don’t make squaddies like they used to as well though?
DonkeyApple said:
True. There will always be something about the Landie that others never came close to having. Probably why most of the later ones were just bought by chaps living in town wanting something that just put a pure smile on their face when pottering down mundane city streets. Although it was a Rangie that went through the Gap. And it was mostly carried and dragged by some squaddies. We could talk about how they don’t make squaddies like they used to as well though?
The 1971/72 Range Rover expedition is more well know but a humble Land Rover crossed it first ten years earlier:
And even Blashford-Snell’s 71/72 Range Rover expedition had to buy a local second hand series Land Rover to act as a pathfinder for the Range Rovers!
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