RE: Land Rover launches new 525hp Defender V8
Discussion
300bhp/ton said:
Cold said:
Well, I'm not the one saying it's too complicated to operate nor am I babbling on making presumptions of the vehicle based on lack of knowledge.
Some on here have doing that over and again since the vehicle was launched and make such a fuss that their ill-informed childish noise tends to overshadow any new Defender story.
It would be amusing if it wasn't so tiresomely predictable.
Clearly you have a chip on your shoulder over this. Some on here have doing that over and again since the vehicle was launched and make such a fuss that their ill-informed childish noise tends to overshadow any new Defender story.
It would be amusing if it wasn't so tiresomely predictable.
Btw I’m not uniformed. I Have spent seat time in the new Defender on and off road. Have you? I’d guess not, else you wouldn’t be dismissing that the Terrain Response is complex. It simply is. This is looking at it as my day job profession as a software tester. I also don’t dislike the vehicle either or the brand.
...but could certainly do with some more training.
M
RacerMike said:
300bhp/ton said:
A f
king load more when the vehicle isn't moving 
Simply not true. The eDiff has preload settings that are mode dependent. You’re perhaps thinking of traction control, although even that now has the ability to pre fill brake pressure into stationary wheels when in certain modes. There simply isn’t anything than a manual lock will do that the eDiff can’t. Well....apart from result in horrible instability when one wheel has a great deal more traction than the other and the torque on the high grip wheel overwhelms the available traction and results in it going sideways rather than forward.king load more when the vehicle isn't moving The general issue with your outlook 300 is that you are unable or unwilling to accept that older isn’t always better. It may be slightly more involving (if manually locking a diff really does it for you!) but to claim that a manually locking diff is better than an eDiff is patently wrong. To achieve what the eDiff can do you’d need your passenger to sit there with a wheel speed readout for each wheel and a manually controlled lever that would enable him to infinitely adjust the locking torque of the diff. How many Defenders have you driven that had that feature?
...and on a pedant note: The eDiff _technically_ never locks, it just varies the resistance. However, you'd need circa 30,000Nm to make it slip.
M
wormus said:
300bhp/ton said:
Clearly you have a chip on your shoulder over this.
Btw I’m not uniformed. I Have spent seat time in the new Defender on and off road. Have you? I’d guess not, else you wouldn’t be dismissing that the Terrain Response is complex. It simply is. This is looking at it as my day job profession as a software tester. I also don’t dislike the vehicle either or the brand.
Terrain response was developed in 2001, so 20 years ago. Since then it’s been updated several times and from my experience of it, it works really well. Btw I’m not uniformed. I Have spent seat time in the new Defender on and off road. Have you? I’d guess not, else you wouldn’t be dismissing that the Terrain Response is complex. It simply is. This is looking at it as my day job profession as a software tester. I also don’t dislike the vehicle either or the brand.
Foolishly, a couple of weeks ago I parked mine on soaking wet, soft ground and I knew when I could feel it sink as I drove onto it that I’d be in trouble getting back out. Initially it just span all 4 wheels and went sideways, so I put it in snow setting and it just drove out. It really does work.
M
Max_Torque said:
urquattroGus said:
Ref the new Defender and terrain response, I went on a shoot last year and a guy had a new 110 Defender. We were all looking at it and he was very proud.
Later on we all had to drive down into a small valley with a muddy gateway and back up a hill.
The convoy had mostly Japanese pickups and I was in a L322 Range Rover which admittedly does have semi off road tyres on it.
Guess who got stuck 4 times trying to get up the hill! The new Defender. No one else out of the 10 or so vehicles struggled.
Couldn’t help cracking up to be honest, he had 4-5 goes to get up the hill. He must have been in the wrong mode or something but how embarrassed was he when we got back to the farm!
Our Range Rover is a 2006 supercharged model, just before extra fancy terrain response came in, usually turn the tc off as otherwise you can get bogged down! At least there is plenty of power to keep momentum up ??
I see you story and relate mine, where in 1996 my Integrale was the ONLY vehicle to get out of a (very)wet grass field when taking part in the AWDC's "Welsh Hill rally" that year, and that includes ALL the competitor vehicles. As a result i nomiate the 1991 Lancia Detla Integrale EVO 1 as the best off road vehicle ever made ;-)Later on we all had to drive down into a small valley with a muddy gateway and back up a hill.
The convoy had mostly Japanese pickups and I was in a L322 Range Rover which admittedly does have semi off road tyres on it.
Guess who got stuck 4 times trying to get up the hill! The new Defender. No one else out of the 10 or so vehicles struggled.
Couldn’t help cracking up to be honest, he had 4-5 goes to get up the hill. He must have been in the wrong mode or something but how embarrassed was he when we got back to the farm!
Our Range Rover is a 2006 supercharged model, just before extra fancy terrain response came in, usually turn the tc off as otherwise you can get bogged down! At least there is plenty of power to keep momentum up ??
More seriously, the point i am making is that you cannot draw any meanigful conculusion from a single event, especially where tyres and driver skill play such a massive part is the difference between "making a fist of it" and simple "driving right out"
BTW, the real reason my 'grale got out and no one else was the fact it was a) on M&S tyres, had >200 bhp and was very light compared to the rest of the landrovers and range rovers and also 2) no WAY was i letting the local farm tractor driving animal hitch his massive tractor up to my little 'grale and watch him yank the entire front clean off it..... ;-)
Others in the group seemed to manage on road tyres though.I managed to get my Focus RS out of a very muddy Silverstone GP carpark by just plotting a route that meant I didn't need to stop, those car parks can be terrible! I knew if I had to stop I was probably done for!
jakeb said:
A new supercharged RR Sport is the same money (and i bet there is some discount to be had). Doesn't make much sense to me.
Realistically I don't think you'd be comparing the two for long. As a customer you'd pivot quickly to what fitted your needs and they're very different.We were comparing the Defender against a FFRR. The Defender is considerably bigger in the back than the RRS which is something that was important. In the end it came down to the fact that the FFRR was a bit 'precious'. I'm fed up of constantly taking the car to get scratches repaired from branches, snow banks etc that I've brushed against when squeezing down tracks. I just want something I can throw kit (skis, bikes...) in without worrying it's going to scratch something or jump in covered in mud or snow without worrying about the seats. Sure you can cover everything in rubber matting but what is the point in getting a nice interior if all you're going to do is cover it up?. My current car spends the winter with pools of water in the floormats at the moment from snow melt.
Oh, and electric rear doors, electric folding rear seats etc and even an electric armrest all operating slowly really get on my nerves.
jakeb said:
A new supercharged RR Sport is the same money (and i bet there is some discount to be had). Doesn't make much sense to me.
I would genuinely love a new Defender in a the right spec (or a top spec Jeep Wrangler, or maybe a G-wagon in non pimp spec) but wouldn't be seen dead driving a RR Sport and would never consider owning one.
camel_landy said:
wormus said:
300bhp/ton said:
Clearly you have a chip on your shoulder over this.
Btw I’m not uniformed. I Have spent seat time in the new Defender on and off road. Have you? I’d guess not, else you wouldn’t be dismissing that the Terrain Response is complex. It simply is. This is looking at it as my day job profession as a software tester. I also don’t dislike the vehicle either or the brand.
Terrain response was developed in 2001, so 20 years ago. Since then it’s been updated several times and from my experience of it, it works really well. Btw I’m not uniformed. I Have spent seat time in the new Defender on and off road. Have you? I’d guess not, else you wouldn’t be dismissing that the Terrain Response is complex. It simply is. This is looking at it as my day job profession as a software tester. I also don’t dislike the vehicle either or the brand.
Foolishly, a couple of weeks ago I parked mine on soaking wet, soft ground and I knew when I could feel it sink as I drove onto it that I’d be in trouble getting back out. Initially it just span all 4 wheels and went sideways, so I put it in snow setting and it just drove out. It really does work.
M
Not that it’s really worth discussing with him as I’ll never be right, but there’s a level of pedantry in the statement ‘it can’t predict what you want all the time’. No it can’t, but it can lock basically all the time. Which it does in all practical senses in modes like Rock Crawl. Beyond that I’m not really sure what he’s getting at.
300, I think you (unsurprisingly) fundamentally misunderstand how the software for the eDiff works. It doesn’t ‘need slip’ to lock. In every off road mode it has an amount of preload meaning it’s always locked to varying degrees whenever you pull away. So basically unless you’re hammering across a rock trail at 30mph, it’s locked. If you’re referring to the little graphic on the HMI, it may blow your mind to discover that it doesn’t tell the full truth as doing so would probably be monumentally confusing to the most drivers.
urquattroGus said:
I managed to get my Focus RS out of a very muddy Silverstone GP carpark by just plotting a route that meant I didn't need to stop, those car parks can be terrible! I knew if I had to stop I was probably done for!
Ha, reminds me of the one time I've been to Le Mans - was in my GT3 and needed to drive over a muddy bank to get into the campsite. I envisgaed that ripping the front splitter off or getting completely beached on top of the bank was going to cause much amusement to the nearby crowds but thankfully a mix of angle and a little momentum got me over!I'm sure this Pretender wouldn't have managed it.
urquattroGus said:
I managed to get my Focus RS out of a very muddy Silverstone GP carpark by just plotting a route that meant I didn't need to stop, those car parks can be terrible! I knew if I had to stop I was probably done for!
I managed to get my old Cayenne (manually locking diffs and all!!) irreparably beached on the gentle slope of the car park to the right of the paddock gate at Donny. Beached to the point of having to abandon it and get a request out on the PA for people to move their cars so it could be driven down the slopeWife’s old Evoque with its poxy haldex AWD breezed up it like it wasn’t even there
She was so smug that once all the other cars were clear I pointed the Cayenne up the slope and mashed it until it started climbing the slope an inch at a time. Took me nearly 5 minutes to climb a 10 metre slope
Well, I didn’t like the new Defender at all!
Starting to get used to the looks now, the 5.0L V8 is a superb engine.
I’m holding off till the end of the year to see what the new Range Rover looks like.
Rumour has it that it will come with the BMW twin-turbo V8.
The Defender with the Supercharged Jaguar engine makes this an attractive alternative.
I wouldn’t sell my Classic 110 for it though.
It would be more to complement it, which kind of says it all about the market change for the Defender really.
Starting to get used to the looks now, the 5.0L V8 is a superb engine.
I’m holding off till the end of the year to see what the new Range Rover looks like.
Rumour has it that it will come with the BMW twin-turbo V8.
The Defender with the Supercharged Jaguar engine makes this an attractive alternative.
I wouldn’t sell my Classic 110 for it though.
It would be more to complement it, which kind of says it all about the market change for the Defender really.
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