What does it sound like when a polite, urbane, upper-class English car enthusiast hates a new car? It sounds like the video above. Have a watch and see if you agree. But first, a bit of background.
The 2023 Land Rover Defender 110. It doesn’t suck.
In case you’ve been living in an underground ice cave for the past few years, or maybe if you’ve just been living in the real world and not spending your time immersed in the culture of old Land Rovers, the “party line” regarding the NEW Land Rover Defender is that it’s not good! Or, well… it’s good, but it’s not a proper Defender! Or, you know… it isn’t like the old one! It doesn’t even look like the old one! Hrrrrumph! A travesty!
This has caused a great deal of consternation among old Land Rover lovers. (Let’s refuse to speculate, for the time being at least, about whether or not these same people castigate the new Porsche 911 for not looking like a 1980’s G-body 911, or whether they’re angry at Ferrari for not cranking out fakey-doo 250GTO “homage” cars. We’ll leave that alone for now.) The bottom line? It has become de rigueur for lovers of the old Defender to bash on the new one.
I have never shared this position. I love the new Defender, and I am so happy - and frankly a bit surprised - that Land Rover took such a bold forward step with the design and styling. And the key word there is forward. Land Rover looked forward with the new Defender, not backward. They didn’t think to themselves: “How can we make something that looks and feels like the old one?” They took a clean sheet of paper and built the best NEW Defender they could build. And that shouldn’t be revolutionary for a car manufacturer, but in these days when retro styling is king, it seems to be. And that… mildly annoys me. Don’t get me wrong, I love old things, and I even love a lot of retro-styled new things, but there is a limit. I don’t want every brand new thing I own to look vaguely like it was made in the 1960’s. I just don’t.
The 2022 Lamborghini Countach, which Gandini, the designer of the original Countach, despises.
In 2022, Lamborghini sold a limited run model called the “Countach,” which was named after their legendary supercar from the 1970’s and 80’s, and it looked, broadly, the part. Little more than a warmed over Aventador with some Sian bits thrown in, it wowed a lot of neophytes and got a lot of Instagram likes, but it always felt - to me anyway - like a crass and rather shallow marketing ploy. A way to squeeze another few million bucks out of people with too much money as it is. And I was not the only one who noticed. Marcello Gandini himself, the genius automotive stylist responsible for the groundbreaking original Countach design, hated the thing and refused to be associated with it, saying in part: “I have built my identity as a designer on a concept that each new model would be an innovation, and something completely different from the previous. The confidence of not wanting to give into habit is the very essence of my work. It is clear that a lot has changed in terms of marketing, but as far as I am concerned, to repeat a model from the past represents a negation of the founding principles of my design DNA.”
Ouch.
I couldn’t agree more. Old things are cool. New things that LOOK like old things? Meh. There are times when a retro design can be cool, but to be enslaved by the past is a set of shackles. It’s almost an admission that you don’t have any good new ideas, and need to rehash the good ideas of 40 or 50 years ago in a desperate bid to remain relevant.
The (new?) Ford Bronco…
Ford, like Lamborghini, has built a retro styled Bronco, which looks for all the world like a Bronco from the 1970’s. Good for them, and it seems like a great truck. But Land Rover (like Ferrari) doesn’t do that. They are proud of their history but never shackled to it, and they looked forward, boldly, and built the best NEW Defender they could build. It’s a modern design, with light cues from the past but devoid of cookie cutter laziness. It’s more capable in 99% of off road situations than the old Defender, and 400% more capable than 99.99999% of Defender buyers will ever need. Ever. It’s safer, more refined, more comfortable, more useable, and more efficient than the old Defender. It’s better in pretty much every way, so why would it look like the old one?! Purely for nostalgia? That’s bollocks.
I go into all this today because the hard core “new Defender haters,” the keepers of the old Defender flame, people I love and work with mind you, have been pinning their hopes to the recently introduced Ineos Grenadier, a new truck that looks like an old Defender, with a ladder frame and live axles, built by an English billionaire to out-Defender the new actual Defender. And it has gotten a lot of press, and I am sure it will find a small but passionate following among people for whom retro style is more important than modern capabilities. I am not here to bash it. I think it’s cool that Sir Jim Ratcliffe built it, and I applaud his passion. But the bottom line is that… it just isn’t as good as the new Defender. I wish it was, but it isn’t. Not for most people, anyway. The Grenadier is what happens when one supremely rich man fulfills a retro-tinged sandbox fantasy and builds himself what he, and pretty much he alone, wants. And that’s awesome in a way, but the result will never be the same as a proper car engineered by a proper car company.
The new Defender is quite simply the only truly off road vehicle Land Rover makes in 2023. Let that sink in for a moment. If you’re in the savannas of Africa, hundreds of miles away from the closest town, you won’t see an Evoque out there, or a Discovery Sport, or a new Velar. You just won’t. But you could see a new Defender out there, most definitely. Love it or hate it, despite certain flaws and nits to pick, it’s a proper off roader. Can we all maybe give it a break for crying out loud?
A very cool original Defender 110, built by us, Autology Motors.
These days, you can buy the adventure vehicle you want. There is the Ineos Grenadier, which will please some people, no doubt. The new Bronco which will please others. There is the Jeep Wrangler which continues to please many. And there are plenty of others. You can buy an old Defender from a company like mine, done up the way you want it. You can have a custom adventure rig built on a 70-series Land Cruiser platform, which is somehow still in production after four decades. You can even make a surprising amount of hay with a new Suzuki Jimny. But you can also buy the brand new Land Rover Defender, and if you did it would be as legitimate a choice as any of the others.