RE: Twisted decides the fate of its last 80 Defenders
Discussion
Hats off to Twisted for making their business work, but they're really not for me. Realize that these are equally led by vanity, but I much prefer the approach of these chaps to Defender modding:
https://www.coolnvintage.com/cars
https://www.coolnvintage.com/cars
And as a few have summed up.
One of the biggest issues with the Defender is its buyers. Many are the “one life, live it” crowd...
Others are the posers and image obsession driven group.
Not many of the group that use it for a working truck are left as they have moved onto Jap pick ups that do most of what it can do but in far better comfort.
Shame really.
One of the biggest issues with the Defender is its buyers. Many are the “one life, live it” crowd...
Others are the posers and image obsession driven group.
Not many of the group that use it for a working truck are left as they have moved onto Jap pick ups that do most of what it can do but in far better comfort.
Shame really.
A.J.M said:
Not many of the group that use it for a working truck are left as they have moved onto Jap pick ups that do most of what it can do but in far better comfort.
Shame really.
Yes the shame is that Land Rover have sat on their arse with an outdated design for so long and that customers have been far too loyalShame really.
The alternatives are not only better designed, more reliable, have more features but are also cheaper !
Whilst I want Land Rover to succeed they really deserve to have gone bust many years ago
JohnoVR6 said:
Hats off to Twisted for making their business work, but they're really not for me. Realize that these are equally led by vanity, but I much prefer the approach of these chaps to Defender modding:
https://www.coolnvintage.com/cars
I follow their facebook page but didn't realise how much they did themselves, I kind of thought it was just a feed of cool looking cars, as they don't seem to focus solely on LRs.https://www.coolnvintage.com/cars
But I do really like the look of the orange one
406dogvan said:
The Defender thing is weird - yes, they're iconic, capable off-roaders but all these specials and remakes are missing the core of that in favour of stuff like V8 engines (never the right choice), padded-leather drenched interiors (really?) and other frippery
The fact that the Defender is so in-demand but you cannot give-away a Series III also strikes me as odd - yes, their engines are absolute garbage but then so are many Defender engines...
If you discount all of the N/A and non Di diesels, the best thing about Defenders are their engines. The 200/300tdi engines are brilliant - genuinely robust unlike everything else on a Defender - and the 2.25 and 2.5 petrols are lovely, sweet things. The fact that the Defender is so in-demand but you cannot give-away a Series III also strikes me as odd - yes, their engines are absolute garbage but then so are many Defender engines...
I remain bemused by the whole Defender phenomenon. Until the 90s , they were just green or grey utilitarian 4wds that more traditional farmers bought. Then came the One Life Live It weirdy beardy crew who spent their weekends buggering about in quarries and getting terribly moist about winches and snorkels .
Things got worse , post millenium, when the likes of Octane's absurd Robert Coucher decided that everybody , him included , had successfully disguised the fact they were deeply in love with some rattly , ancient and unreliable old tugger for decades. But now it was time to come out and after a few years it became compulsory to call the Land Rover a bloody ICON.
Cue a rash of pumped up Land Rover parodies which - despite being a clear case of the Emperor's New Clothes- trendsetters (double retch ) and slebs queued up to be seen in . Especially in urban locations .
But good on Twisted for exploiting the market - I live 5 minutes away from them . I frequently hear what I hope is a Mustang or Camaro burbling through Thirsk market place but turn round to see yet another weapons grade , off grid fantasy of a bloody Land Rover..Makes me smile - you can fool some of the people all of the time .
Things got worse , post millenium, when the likes of Octane's absurd Robert Coucher decided that everybody , him included , had successfully disguised the fact they were deeply in love with some rattly , ancient and unreliable old tugger for decades. But now it was time to come out and after a few years it became compulsory to call the Land Rover a bloody ICON.
Cue a rash of pumped up Land Rover parodies which - despite being a clear case of the Emperor's New Clothes- trendsetters (double retch ) and slebs queued up to be seen in . Especially in urban locations .
But good on Twisted for exploiting the market - I live 5 minutes away from them . I frequently hear what I hope is a Mustang or Camaro burbling through Thirsk market place but turn round to see yet another weapons grade , off grid fantasy of a bloody Land Rover..Makes me smile - you can fool some of the people all of the time .
Billy_Whizzzz said:
406dogvan said:
The Defender thing is weird - yes, they're iconic, capable off-roaders but all these specials and remakes are missing the core of that in favour of stuff like V8 engines (never the right choice), padded-leather drenched interiors (really?) and other frippery
The fact that the Defender is so in-demand but you cannot give-away a Series III also strikes me as odd - yes, their engines are absolute garbage but then so are many Defender engines...
If you discount all of the N/A and non Di diesels, the best thing about Defenders are their engines. The 200/300tdi engines are brilliant - genuinely robust unlike everything else on a Defender - and the 2.25 and 2.5 petrols are lovely, sweet things. The fact that the Defender is so in-demand but you cannot give-away a Series III also strikes me as odd - yes, their engines are absolute garbage but then so are many Defender engines...
i also only recently learnt the engines were stuck in transits too - is this right?
coppice said:
Things got worse , post millenium, when the likes of Octane's absurd Robert Coucher decided that everybody , him included , had successfully disguised the fact they were deeply in love with some rattly , ancient and unreliable old tugger for decades. But now it was time to come out and after a few years it became compulsory to call the Land Rover a bloody ICON.
I noticed that the LR 'scene' took a big change post-2003 when the Defender was won the 'Greatest Car Ever' poll onTop Gear at the same time that Clarkson put it as 'Sub Zero' on their Cool Wall. Before this the LR clubs were full of from weirdy-beardy enthusiasts with greasy hands who rebuilt gearboxes at the weekends and usually had a Land Rover for work, an old Range Rover for 'best' and were building some Series/Disco hybrid for trialling in their garage and who covetted above all a genuine Camel Trophy Defender 110 Station Wagon. I was one of them. Almost overnight there was an influx of 18-year olds who had swapped their Vauxhall Corsas and Nissan Micras for a beaten-up 1985 Ninety 2.5D Hard Top who just wanted to drive around a quarry at speed and intimidate other drivers with their bull bars and spotlamps. They would throw the entire contents of the Scorpion Racing catalogue at their Landy and then dropped in a 200Tdi from a rusted out Disco with a turned-up injector pump and a straight-through exhaust. This was also when all the 'performance' and 'luxury' custom Defenders began to creep onto the market and when the ads pages of LRO stopped being full of practical bolt-on accessories and began flogging Judge Dredd-style grilles, polished chequerplate panels, 'tactical' LED lamp conversions and diamond-cut alloy wheels. V8RX7 said:
A.J.M said:
Not many of the group that use it for a working truck are left as they have moved onto Jap pick ups that do most of what it can do but in far better comfort.
Shame really.
Yes the shame is that Land Rover have sat on their arse with an outdated design for so long and that customers have been far too loyalShame really.
The alternatives are not only better designed, more reliable, have more features but are also cheaper !
Whilst I want Land Rover to succeed they really deserve to have gone bust many years ago
Defenders are to 4x4 utility vehicles what Morgan 4/4s are to sports cars. Fun, characterful, capable and likeable but objectively outdated and functionally obsolete.
It's not even the reliability. I've had several Land Rovers of various types which were absolutely metronomically reliable over years of fairly hard graft (and I've had ones which made my life a misery...). It's the fact that it's a design from the 1980s using engineering from the 1970s to improve a design from the 1940s which used mechanical parts from the 1930s.
Billy_Whizzzz said:
If you discount all of the N/A and non Di diesels, the best thing about Defenders are their engines. The 200/300tdi engines are brilliant - genuinely robust unlike everything else on a Defender - and the 2.25 and 2.5 petrols are lovely, sweet things.
That's a little unfair! The N/A diesels are gutless (in the way that any N/A 60-something bhp IDI diesel will be when put in a 1.5-and-a-bit ton 4x4) but they're sturdy, simple, reliable and surprisingly refined. I know the old 2.5 Diesel Turbo was not a highlight but I had one for 11 years and it was brilliant - a bit thirsty but it pulled better than a Tdi at low/medium revs, never missed a beat and needed only scheduled servicing. But every other example I've known has been a litany of cracked pistons/blown head gaskets/oil leaks/failed pre-combustion chambers/oil-soaked air filters and so on. Mine was one of the very last ones built (three weeks before they switched to the 200Tdi) so I think they'd finally worked all the bugs out of it by then. The Tdis are decent engines but not without their problems (HGF in the 200Tdi, and the 300's infamous timing belt issues when new) but I agree that they were a genuinely industry-leading in their time and engineered to far better standards than virtually anything else that had ever been done to the Series/Defender range. Not that that's a particularly high bar!
I agree on the four-pot petrols. Hugely over-engineered, very smooth and sweet (because it was originally designed to also do service in the Rover P4) and they seem to be literally indestructible. I was an an RTV trial where a 2.25P Series III was stuck while leaning over at a 40-degree angle and the oil pressure light was continually on while the engine was left ticking over to run the capstan winch. It was like that for over 15 minutes and the bearings never even knocked, let alone any further damage.
kurt535 said:
i also only recently learnt the engines were stuck in transits too - is this right?
No. The 2.5 N/A diesel was put in the Freight Rover 300 and a version of the FX4 Black Cab but that was it. The Freight Rover then acquired Ford Transit turbodiesel power - shame that Leyland DAF/LDV had split from the Rover Group by then as the 200Tdi would probably have been a better power unit. The FX4 switched to Nissan engines. The engine from the Transit was put into the Defender in 2007.
Edited by 2xChevrons on Thursday 15th November 11:08
2xChevrons said:
coppice said:
Things got worse , post millenium, when the likes of Octane's absurd Robert Coucher decided that everybody , him included , had successfully disguised the fact they were deeply in love with some rattly , ancient and unreliable old tugger for decades. But now it was time to come out and after a few years it became compulsory to call the Land Rover a bloody ICON.
I noticed that the LR 'scene' took a big change post-2003 when the Defender was won the 'Greatest Car Ever' poll onTop Gear at the same time that Clarkson put it as 'Sub Zero' on their Cool Wall. Before this the LR clubs were full of from weirdy-beardy enthusiasts with greasy hands who rebuilt gearboxes at the weekends and usually had a Land Rover for work, an old Range Rover for 'best' and were building some Series/Disco hybrid for trialling in their garage and who covetted above all a genuine Camel Trophy Defender 110 Station Wagon. I was one of them. Almost overnight there was an influx of 18-year olds who had swapped their Vauxhall Corsas and Nissan Micras for a beaten-up 1985 Ninety 2.5D Hard Top who just wanted to drive around a quarry at speed and intimidate other drivers with their bull bars and spotlamps. They would throw the entire contents of the Scorpion Racing catalogue at their Landy and then dropped in a 200Tdi from a rusted out Disco with a turned-up injector pump and a straight-through exhaust. This was also when all the 'performance' and 'luxury' custom Defenders began to creep onto the market and when the ads pages of LRO stopped being full of practical bolt-on accessories and began flogging Judge Dredd-style grilles, polished chequerplate panels, 'tactical' LED lamp conversions and diamond-cut alloy wheels. V8RX7 said:
A.J.M said:
Not many of the group that use it for a working truck are left as they have moved onto Jap pick ups that do most of what it can do but in far better comfort.
Shame really.
Yes the shame is that Land Rover have sat on their arse with an outdated design for so long and that customers have been far too loyalShame really.
The alternatives are not only better designed, more reliable, have more features but are also cheaper !
Whilst I want Land Rover to succeed they really deserve to have gone bust many years ago
Defenders are to 4x4 utility vehicles what Morgan 4/4s are to sports cars. Fun, characterful, capable and likeable but objectively outdated and functionally obsolete.
It's not even the reliability. I've had several Land Rovers of various types which were absolutely metronomically reliable over years of fairly hard graft (and I've had ones which made my life a misery...). It's the fact that it's a design from the 1980s using engineering from the 1970s to improve a design from the 1940s which used mechanical parts from the 1930s.
Billy_Whizzzz said:
If you discount all of the N/A and non Di diesels, the best thing about Defenders are their engines. The 200/300tdi engines are brilliant - genuinely robust unlike everything else on a Defender - and the 2.25 and 2.5 petrols are lovely, sweet things.
That's a little unfair! The N/A diesels are gutless (in the way that any N/A 60-something bhp IDI diesel will be when put in a 1.5-and-a-bit ton 4x4) but they're sturdy, simple, reliable and surprisingly refined. I know the old 2.5 Diesel Turbo was not a highlight but I had one for 11 years and it was brilliant - a bit thirsty but it pulled better than a Tdi at low/medium revs, never missed a beat and needed only scheduled servicing. But every other example I've known has been a litany of cracked pistons/blown head gaskets/oil leaks/failed pre-combustion chambers/oil-soaked air filters and so on. Mine was one of the very last ones built (three weeks before they switched to the 200Tdi) so I think they'd finally worked all the bugs out of it by then. The Tdis are decent engines but not without their problems (HGF in the 200Tdi, and the 300's infamous timing belt issues when new) but I agree that they were a genuinely industry-leading in their time and engineered to far better standards than virtually anything else that had ever been done to the Series/Defender range. Not that that's a particularly high bar!
I agree on the four-pot petrols. Hugely over-engineered, very smooth and sweet (because it was originally designed to also do service in the Rover P4) and they seem to be literally indestructible. I was an an RTV trial where a 2.25P Series III was stuck while leaning over at a 40-degree angle and the oil pressure light was continually on while the engine was left ticking over to run the capstan winch. It was like that for over 15 minutes and the bearings never even knocked, let alone any further damage.
kurt535 said:
i also only recently learnt the engines were stuck in transits too - is this right?
No. The 2.5 N/A diesel was put in the Freight Rover 300 and a version of the FX4 Black Cab but that was it. The Freight Rover then acquired Ford Transit turbodiesel power - shame that Leyland DAF/LDV had split from the Rover Group by then as the 200Tdi would probably have been a better power unit. The FX4 switched to Nissan engines. The engine from the Transit was put into the Defender in 2007.
Edited by 2xChevrons on Thursday 15th November 11:08
That's a very good summary 2xChevrons! I was just getting into the scene when it hit TG on the cool wall and witnessed exactly what you described. 
I also agree about the comment of six figures for one is a bit mad! I do remember seeing that you could buy rebuilt Toyota FJ models with the bored out / stroked 300TDi engine. They looked quite good, if again aimed at the same market as Twisted. Does anyone know what they were fetching?
I also agree about the comment of six figures for one is a bit mad! I do remember seeing that you could buy rebuilt Toyota FJ models with the bored out / stroked 300TDi engine. They looked quite good, if again aimed at the same market as Twisted. Does anyone know what they were fetching?
Billy_Whizzzz said:
In terms of all the talk of reliability tho, my 2014 USW hasn’t missed a beat in 30,000 miles.
I could get a Hilux but I can’t for the life of me think why I’d want one.
Because no one would mention a Hi lux has been reliable for 30K - they might at 200k and that's the difference !I could get a Hilux but I can’t for the life of me think why I’d want one.
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