Jimny, Forester, Defender, D-max.
Which is our overall winner? Which has taken the most radical leap forward in tech, ergonomics, eye appeal, capability?
Imagine a Land Rover Defender being thought of as a large SUV. The outgoing Defender pre-dated even the SUV category, which was started by its stablemate, the Range Rover.
Land Rover has been around as long as we’ve been using and loving 4WDs. Thus, the DNA of our category winner traces all the way back to 1947 and the original short wheelbase Series I. The old Defender was hard to beat off-road and pretty decent on-road thanks to the mid-life adoption of Discovery underpinnings. Ergonomically though, it had issues that really couldn’t be resolved for most regular-sized folk.
The new Defender is sophisticated but has the offroad smarts of its long proud lineage.
Clearly, the 2021 reimagining of the classic Defender has worked better than the boffins at Solihull – ancestral home of the Defender – could have dreamed possible. Today, a completed Defender emerges from its Slovakian assembly line every two minutes. It does 0 to 100km/h in 6.2 seconds, wades in 850mm of water, has a ground clearance exceeding 220mm and is still visually related to its ancestor.
As well as its formidable capabilities off road, the Defender is a delight to drive on tarmac, gravel or grass, borrowing its on-road sophistication from the likes of the luxurious Range Rover.
The 2021 Defender is capable, comfortable and compatible with the expectations of a contemporary SUV owner. It is no surprise that it has won awards in the past and now adds another one from NZ4WD to its trophy cabinet.
In summary, every so often a new vehicle comes along that rewrites category definitions and manages somehow to carry forward all the expected performance of the outgoing version. The new Defender does this, and it emphatically also expands the envelope of excellence by adding superb on-road driving dynamics that owners of the old Defender could only dream of.