2020 Defender Spy Shots....

[JackW]

This video I saw the link for on Lucky 8's web page is really good - and really long - over two hours - but it does a pretty good job explaining why the Defender had to change so radically. As an extra bonus there is a lot of footage of old Land Rovers running around in Snowdownia, at Goodwood and Billings and fantastic footage of Oxford (First Overland). Give it a look - even the Works Special Defender with the 5.0 V-8 makes an appearance - along with countless old Land Rovers and some great old footage. Watch it and enjoy...

 

[Red90]

...but it does a pretty good job explaining why the Defender had to change so radically.

The point that you are missing is that it did not need to change in THIS WAY...... The Wrangler proves that.

 

[JackW]

The point that you are missing is that it did not need to change in THIS WAY...... The Wrangler proves that.

I think it did, if I'm going to spend as much money on a car as the new Defender it had better be something I can drive every day and that my wife will ride in. It needs to be comfortable, capable and a viable replacement for my Discovery 5. My wife doesn't like my Defender and the thought of going on a 2500 mile trip in it would invite a riot. While I could and did use it to get back and forth to work before I retired and did regular weekend rides of several hundred miles in the D90, the LR3 and Discovery 5 have been stellar all around vehicles. I would expect a New Defender to be able to replace the Discovery but be more capable off road.

I rented a Wrangler on one of my trips to Ft Worth and there is no way I would want to daily drive that thing. After a week I was more than ready to turn that back in.

 

[DieselRanger]

What kind of lift? Via software, or an actual hardware lift kit?

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Probably the lift rods like Johnson Rods and Lucky8 offer.

Basically these prevent the air suspension from lowering below normal height.

DISCOVERY 5 LIFT KIT

These 2in lift rods for your Discovery 5 will fit easily in place of the stock rods and trick your air suspension into thinking that the bags are low, thus filling them with more air and giving you a constant 2 inch of lift. With this lift, you are able to clear larger tires, giving your Rover...

www.lucky8llc.com

Land Rover Parts9

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[DieselRanger]

Umm. Land Rover sells their other models with diesels in North America. It seems silly to leave out the Defender.

Here's the problem - as of right now, diesel regulation is tightening, driven by Obama era regulation and CARB taking 16 other states along with it in their own stricter regulation regime.

Yes, Land Rover sells diesels in NA today, but the 6cyl is the same Ford engine that's now the F150 PowerStroke with mods for heavy-duty towing. JLR's contract with Ford post Ford's sale of JLR is ending, so that engine will disappear from Land Rover vehicles as did the Si6 and 4cyl engines that were basically the Ecoboost gassers. The Td6 a sweet engine, love it in my D5. Absolutely crushes it above 10,000 feet - no problem cruising up Monarch Pass while passing other vehicles.

The Ingenium 4cyl diesel is selling abysmally in Jaguar vehicles in the US. I don't believe it's been certified in bigger, heavier Land Rovers in the US yet, and certification is achieved by the vehicle, not the power train, so each new application is a separate certification process. It's time consuming and expensive for a small automaker. So I think LR will wait to see how regulation evolves under Trump, how well the Defender sells as is, and evaluate whether to bring a diesel in the 2022 time frame.

I do hope a 6cyl Ingenium turbodiesel with ~ 300hp / 500lb-ft shows up for all of Land Rover's vehicles, but I fear the cultural revolution purge against diesels in the US means they won't bother, and the P400 is the best we'll get.



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[nickw]

This video I saw the link for on Lucky 8's web page is really good - and really long - over two hours - but it does a pretty good job explaining why the Defender had to change so radically. As an extra bonus there is a lot of footage of old Land Rovers running around in Snowdownia, at Goodwood and Billings and fantastic footage of Oxford (First Overland). Give it a look - even the Works Special Defender with the 5.0 V-8 makes an appearance - along with countless old Land Rovers and some great old footage. Watch it and enjoy...

"Jeep and Lancruiser fans are looking forward to this new Defender more than the Land Rover fans....you know who you are"

Pretty much sums up this thread based on some of the replies

 

[Red90]

I think it did, if I'm going to spend as much money on a car as the new Defender it had better be something I can drive every day and that my wife will ride in. It needs to be comfortable, capable and a viable replacement for my Discovery 5. My wife doesn't like my Defender and the thought of going on a 2500 mile trip in it would invite a riot. While I could and did use it to get back and forth to work before I retired and did regular weekend rides of several hundred miles in the D90, the LR3 and Discovery 5 have been stellar all around vehicles. I would expect a New Defender to be able to replace the Discovery but be more capable off road.

I rented a Wrangler on one of my trips to Ft Worth and there is no way I would want to daily drive that thing. After a week I was more than ready to turn that back in.

And you are the perfect new Defender owner then. And you are not the right person for a traditional Land Rover. My wife daily drives a 110 with an LT95.

The point being that the Wrangler outsells the “Land Rover” by 10 times. The market is there and it is huge. The new Defender could have taken a big chunk. But it won’t. It is in the boring luxury SUV segment and of no more interest than a dozen other cars.

 

[JeepColorado]

"Jeep and Lancruiser fans are looking forward to this new Defender more than the Land Rover fans....you know who you are"

Pretty much sums up this thread based on some of the replies

I'm one of those! Traditionally a Jeep fan who has always found LR intriguing. The more I've looked though what I realized is that I liked the IDEA of LR - the idea of a true off-roader with a deep and storied history. When you look at owning the actual product, especially a classic Defender the case becomes much less compelling. After reading plenty on them, checking out a few that I could get access to, I realized that they were never comfortable or even really all that great off-road- as in, they don't have lockers and they have terrible articulation. They were glorified tractors. What they were was very simple and easy to fix- which is good, but not great. I even considered buying one of the conversions they do now- where they keep the LR body, but then use GM/Chevy parts for all the mechanics because LR mechanicals are terrible. Who wants to spend $150K on that? Then my wife and I were in the market for a luxury SUV with enough off-road prowess to run around Colorado, Utah and California- looked at LR4- it's the vehicle she really wanted to go with at first. The Grand Cherokee Summit was as nice on the inside, leather, electronics, touch screen (which was actually nicer than the LR4) all that stuff; had the same type of air spring, traction control set up so they were largely the same off-road, but the Jeep came with a Hemi V8, while the LR4 came with a 6-cyl and of course, the Jeep was $10,000 less and still had more features such as all of the safety electronics! Money you can use to buy from not 1 or 2 aftermarket suppliers like most LRs have supporting them, but from the dozens or even hundreds in the case of the Wrangler supporting them! Lucky8 and Johnson Rods as great as they are, are the only people willing to build something aftermarket for LRs in the last 10 years, because the aftermarket knows the truth- people don't use these things to go off-road and they don't keep them around for years investing money into fixing them up because they are not great long-term vehicles.

Once again I find myself in the market- looking. I've held off on purchasing anything because I was specifically waiting on this. I'd hoped that with all of the other Vanilla Cross-Over SUVs LR had in it's stable (although admittedly very luxurious on the inside) it'd take 1 of it's models and do something really different, stay true to it's legacy and it's heritage. LR didn't need to make another farm truck Defender, but it's clear from the Wrangler's example that there is an incredible market for a rough and tough 4x4. So far, this doesn't seem to be it to me- it's a little too McGovern Design Languag-y with no front locker and Air Springs. It is kind of cool that they are driving 4x4 tech forward- I think that's great, I'd have a lot more confidence in their ability to do it had not been for the last few decades of watching them struggle with some of the basic electronic stuff. Hopefully, the Defender proves itself to be worthy over time- right now, with a lot still unknown it looks like there's really only 1 vehicle out there that has off-road in it's very DNA with a long-storied and glorious history it hasn't forgotten- and that vehicle has 7 slots in it's grill.

 

[RoyJ]

The video sums it up perfectly - the "true enthusiasts" who holds onto their original Defenders are not part of the future customer base. They already have their Defender and will likely keep it forever. This is proven by the few thousand sales a year in 2015.

I'm one of the few that would buy a new original, if it's available in Canada. But I also recognize I'm in 0.1% of the population. It'll be business suicide for LR, or any other company to cater to me (Toyota and 70-Series).

Jeep is already well established. If LR tries to be Jeep, they'll be out-Jeeped by Jeep. Think about it, they'd have to source parts (axles) from Dana just like Jeep, without deep volume discount. Their power-trains are very expensive compared to a Pentastar. They have to tool a new production line to make body on frame, can't reuse LR3/LR4 frames as those are IFS/IRS. They don't have the aftermarket recognition of Jeep. So in the end, they'd have a $70k pseudo-Wrangler, which save for hardcore Defender fans (again), people would pick a real Wrangler over.

 

[JackW]

And you are the perfect new Defender owner then. And you are not the right person for a traditional Land Rover. My wife daily drives a 110 with an LT95.

Excuse me? Not the right person for a traditional Land Rover? There are four Land Rovers in my driveway right now - a 1967 Series IIA pickup that I'm doing a frame up restoration on - a 1966 109" diesel wagon - I'm the third owner of that one, I bought it in 1978 and it currently has over 450,000 miles on it - over 250K of which I added. A Defender 90 with a 300 TDi engine that I have driven for over 120,000 miles in the fifteen years I've owned it and a 2017 Discovery 5 TDV6 with over 31,000 miles on it. I've owned 19 Land Rovers since buying my first one - a 1961 Series II in 1972. I've put hundreds of thousands of miles on my Land Rovers in the last 47 years. I've owned a Series 1, around ten Series IIA's, 5 Range Rover classics, and a Discovery 1, 3 and 5. I'm a retired Lockheed engineer but I used to work on cars for a living between gigs as a Land Surveyor. I've driven four wheel drive vehicles since I was a teenager - including Jeeps, Internationals, Broncos, Blazers and a few other things you've probably never even heard of. I've also restored Porsches (including my old 1956 356A 4-cam Carrera and my 1971 911), crewed on a couple of IMSA race cars and owned about twenty motorcycles.

The new Defender looks exactly like what I want to supplement my existing fleet of three older cousins - and I'll bet it will go anywhere I can go in my Defender 90 once I get some underbody protection on it. It will be perfect for a tour of the west that includes the roads in SW Colorado, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, The Trans Am Trail, and the Back Country Discovery Routes (BDR). On a long trip I typically drive for 10-12 hours a day - and I can tell you you'll cover a lot more ground in a D5 or New Defender than you will in a SIIA 2.25 liter diesel 109" station wagon that tops out at 60 mph.

I'm just grumpy because I've been told no diesel version for the US market.....

 

[JackW]

She's 67, 5'2" and has a bad knee - she has a hard enough time getting in the Discovery but I have a folding stool that she can stand on to get in the Defender when we have to go somewhere in it.
At least she doesn't keep me from getting the toys I want - including this latest addition to the Land Rover fleet.
The Series IIA 88" will be low enough for her to climb into and she thinks its "cute" so she'll ride in that. I've owned a bunch of crappy cars over the years - she likes the Discovery 5.

 

[68camaro]

Pretty interesting older (2015) article on why writer thinks people line up to buy Rovers even with reliability issues.....https://jalopnik.com/if-range-rovers-are-so-unreliable-why-do-people-still-1728727599

Not sure if totally true but I think he has a point.

 

[Thorsten]

Pretty interesting older (2015) article on why writer thinks people line up to buy Rovers even with reliability issues.....https://jalopnik.com/if-range-rovers-are-so-unreliable-why-do-people-still-1728727599

Not sure if totally true but I think he has a point.

I'd agree with that to an extent. Land Rover among its following has a sizable percentage of well-heeled patrons that are happy to pay a premium for a product they perceive as exclusive / special stemming from either scarcity, cost, or both. Of course that's the whole reliability sticking point -- higher cost doesn't not guarantee higher quality / reliability. But as the article points out, many people just don't care. Or at least they haven't in the past. And we know that from how they voted -- with their dollars.

What's also interesting.... is take that sentiment from the article and in this thread you can to some degree see it applied to the new Defender in relation to the other LR models... The Defender's D7X platform has irked some by essentially carrying over some many parts from the Discovery and other LR models. The Land Cruiser may be a parts bins effort across Toyota models in some areas (interior bits) -- but the new Defender clearly borrows from from the LR parts bins. There's even that Jalopnik article where the author climbed under and noted identical part #s. Does it matter though at the end of the day? We enthusiasts can argue to our hearts content on this thread, but ultimately the market will decide. Time will tell.

 

[onemanarmy]

@JackW

You made my (and others point). JLR already makes a handful of IFS/IRS unibody vehicles that will handle your north rim visit or 12 hour cross country in comfort. Why slander the Defender name with more of the same?

The new Defender could have held onto its rugged roots and still been upgraded with TATAs money and modern design and engineering....ala Gwagen and Wrangler. It could have been so much more. No removable top and/or doors? JLR made a convertible Range Rover Evoque as a convertible! How crazy is it that they didn't with the Defender, a model that had removable top and doors for its entire 60 years! It's like they wanted to one up Toyota with that FJ Cruiser non-sense.

You didn't like the new Wrangler you rented...that's ok. They are selling like hot cakes regardless. There are hundreds of choices from the all automakers if you want a unibody IFS/IRS SUV laden with too much tech.

And nobody is buying diesels in serious numbers. Gas is cheap, diesel cost more upfront, to fuel up, and to maintain.

Again, no one is saying that this new vehicle isn't cool in some ways, its just not a Defender. Like that Jalopnik article said, people buy Land Rovers even though they depreciate off a cliff and aren't that reliable....JLR could have brought a vehicle to market with almost no peers, based of a legendary design, name, and ruggedness. There is a lacking in the true, rugged, minimalist offroad SUV market these days, and companies keep missing the mark as it's staring them right in the face.

 

[Christian P.]

This video I saw the link for on Lucky 8's web page is really good - and really long - over two hours - but it does a pretty good job explaining why the Defender had to change so radically. As an extra bonus there is a lot of footage of old Land Rovers running around in Snowdownia, at Goodwood and Billings and fantastic footage of Oxford (First Overland). Give it a look - even the Works Special Defender with the 5.0 V-8 makes an appearance - along with countless old Land Rovers and some great old footage. Watch it and enjoy...

That video is excellent! thanks for bringing it up