Indeed - $30k might be a bit light by the looks of things today, but there are a handful in Canada in the $50-$70k range, and in Canada we might even see some ex-military ones up for government auction from time to time in the future. I'm personally not a huge fan of the platform, but most of my reasoning for that is entirely subjective and I fully acknowledge it is/can be a great choice if folks are willing to tackle the compromises you mentioned
The number of ECUs and electronic systems is less relevant than how reliant on those systems the vehicle is to function, and in reality we don’t know about the Grenadier until it’s been released and used by folks for a few months. But what it comes down to is that all of these vehicles will break — what happens when they do?
With the New Defender, it appears that at least some of the ways it breaks — an OTA update failing, a severed cable, a few other examples anecdotally around the web — suggests that it sits down on you and won’t move. That’s inconvenient in the driveway. It’s potentially deadly in the backcountry. It’s so reliant on the electronics in order to do its job — which is make the motor mote and the wheels wheel — that when those electronics go wrong, it seems that at least in some cases the motor no longer motes and thus the wheels don’t wheel, and it cannot be fixed on the side of the trail in these cases.
The Grenadier is claimed to be designed with Bushproofness in mind — which means even if the electronics go wrong, the motor might still mote and the wheels still wheel. To quote from a Toyota slogan that I heard on TV from Richard Hammond — “Lots of 4x4s will get you there, but a Land Cruiser will always get you home”. This was said after his rear diff exploded and he was forced to finish his journey by disconnecting the rear prop shaft and have his FJ40 crawl it’s way forward with it’s front wheels from locking the transfer case — that’s a trail side repair, doable with hand tools, and the rig got him where he needed to go (Sort of…but I won’t ruin the ending of that special for those who have yet to see it!). The Grenadier is meant to be designed with that fix-it-with-bailing-wire ethos in mind; the New Defender is most definitely not. If you had a Diff explode on the New Defender, because all of it is electronically controlled, I’d be willing to bet my paycheque that the vehicle would throw a code and the best case scenario is a low-speed “limp home” but I think even that is optimistic - I would suspect it would sit down completely, given the experiences of others with major failures.
That being said, the majority of New Defender owners seem thrilled with the rig and it works great for them. But there’s a handful (okay, maybe two handfuls) of stories where the rig has not worked great, and it wasn’t the kind of thing a guy could fix with hand tools and gumption - it requires dealership support and intervention and a tow truck. So for that reason, the Gren is appealing, because it’s supposed to be fixable by the shade-tree mechanic on the side of the trail — but we don’t know if they’ll deliver on the promise till it’s been on the market and a few folks have broken them. There will almost certainly be situations in the Gren that do cause it to fail — ECUs control the fuel flow and spark after all — but there are a lot of other critical systems (4x4, diff locks, suspension, etc.) that appear to be pretty analog in the Gren (and thus a good chance of a fella bodging together a fix in the back-of-beyond) as compared to the New Defender, which relies on digital systems for a lot more things.
