Land Rover went back to the beginning – a windswept beach in North Wales – to open the Defender’s final chapter in 2015. The manufacturer had announced that December 2015 was last orders for Britain’s favourite 4x4 – but it was determined it’d bow out after one heck of a leaving do. So it sent the venerable all-terrain workhorse – and five of its elder siblings – off to Anglesey to start a year of farewell celebrations.
Celebrating Britain’s Workhorse Hero: The Land Rover Defender
The results were spectacular – the sight of six classic Land Rovers carving a Defender outline into the sand at Red Wharf Bay, the very place where Rover engineering director Maurice Wilks sketched out his ideas for a new off-roader in 1947. That wonderful clip of Landies working together and pulling ploughs down the beach was the opening note in the Defender’s swansong.
The classic world responded by putting the spotlight on the Land Rover – and particularly the 1990-on Defender models – at many major events this year. For example, The Heritage Motor Centre – recently renamed the British Motor Museum – used the publicity around the end of Defender production to reintroduce its Land Rover Show after a five-year absence, with the star attraction a special display dedicated to the Defender and its Ninety, One Ten and One Thirty predecessors.
Top Gear thrust the Land Rover farewell into living rooms across the globe by re-creating Land Rover’s infamous 1987 dam-busting advert by sending a Series I up the side of a dam – complete with a nervous Richard Hammond at the helm. Then Goodwood got in on the act. Not only did Land Rover use a Series I to re-create the company’s tilt testing machine at the 1948 Earls Court Motor Show exhibition, but this year’s Revival was the setting for one of the most ambitious classic Land Rover outings ever staged.
Everything from Winston Churchill’s Series I to the Dunsfold’s Collection’s Series IIA-based Forest Rover took part in a series of 55-strong parades around Goodwood’s circuit. It might not have been as tyre-smoking as the St Mary’s Trophy race but it was every bit as memorable – as Goodwood itself put it, it was ‘a poignant reminder of how the Land Rover is woven into the fabric of Britishness’. So tightly woven, in fact, that even Land Rover itself struggled to let it go. There was’t be a dry eye in the house when the last Landie rolled out of Lode Lane.
The Defender makes no apologies for arriving a bit unkempt at the party. The scuffs in its seats and the scratches in its paintwork are like stains on a boiler suit – it’d rather be out there doing some hard graft than making the automotive equivalent of award acceptance speeches. Unlike all the other attendees, this 110 Hi-Cap pick-up is still a working vehicle – in fact we dragged it away from its day job of lugging things around Bicester Heritage. That’s definitely the vibe you get when you clamber up into its three-seater cab and hear the metallic clank of the driver’s door as you slam it behind you.
You sit almost upright in sparse, echoey surroundings, with the vehicle’s slab sides right up against your shoulders – the Defender is more habitable than Land Rovers of old but it’s still the sort of interior you could hose out after a mucky day trundling around a building site, with chunky rubber floor mats and slab of uninviting grey plastic lining each door. It’s the same story with the controls – not so much a dashboard as an automotive workbench, with the dials neatly lined up across a slab of dark plastic without a curve or swoosh of a stylist’s pen in sight. Not that you’ll care, because you’ll either be in revelling in the commanding driving position or – more likely – far too busy to notice the trimmings.
Twist the key and there’s a judder as the 300TDi up front clatters into life – it’s not an engine note to write home about but you can’t fault its enthusiasm. You almost feel as though you’re taking the transmission out for a walk as you slot into first to pull off – it’s a big, chunky lever with a very long throw – and at first you manhandle the huge two-spoke steering wheel as you trundle forwards.
It bounces and lurches about, even with the coil suspension rather than the leaf system of the old Series models, it’s still set up with hardiness rather than a smooth ride in mind. You soon get a sense of its on-road abilities – push too hard in the corners and you’ll be treated to a some gentle understeer and a lot of body roll, but rustle up the 300TDi’s ample helpings of torque and it’s more than happy to rumble along on the straighter, faster stretches.
Then there’s its party trick. Yes, it might arrive more grubbily and noisily than the other classics here, but add a few inches of snow or some flash flooding en-route and chances are the Defender would be the only one of our dozen to actually arrive.
It has permanent four-wheel drive, controlled by three transfer boxes and delivered to the terra firma (or terra sticky) through knobbly Goodyear tyres – if the BMW M3 is a pair of Nike Air trainers and the Citroën a set of arty loafers, then the Defender’s the grubby pair of walking boots you rely on to get you up Helvellyn. It has short, stubby overhangs so it can tackle a 50-degree incline without working up a sweat and the ability to wade through half a metre of water. Nor does it rely on complicated electronic wizardry to overcome the elements – which means there’s less to go wrong and it’s easier to mend.
Its Meccano-esque simplicity might make it look crude but it’s also its primary survival tool. Yet you can’t help feel the Defender won’t respond to our farewells with a teary-eyed speech – it’ll just carry on plodding on, well past the very moment the axe finally fell.