Some time ago we were writing that the Land Rover is going to release the new version of their legendary Land Rover Defender. Production of the previous model was stopped in January 2016.
According to the Car magazine, the standard Defender, marked within the Land Rover company as L851, will appear in 2020. The model will be offered with different body options. The new family of Defenders will also include Sport modification with an electric power plant. The SUV will receive special chassis settings for comfortable movement on ordinary roads and will be aimed at wealthy clients of the brand who lead an active lifestyle. Defender Sport might be released to the market in 2026.
But let's get back to the standard Defender. According to the preliminary information, the range of new Defender’s engines should include petrol and diesel supercharged four-cylinder two-liter units, as well as the three-liter V6 engines. The electric engine, according to rumors, will be available only in Sport edition. The defender will be built on a new aluminum platform with a fully independent suspension.
Land Rover has begun testing of the new generation of famous SUV on roads. Spy photos of this vehicle were posted by Autocar magazine. Despite all information about SUV is kept secret, it is assumed that the next Land Rover Defender will be built using aluminum architecture. The SUV borrows many components and technical solutions from other current Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) vehicles.
At the same time, another magazine reported that clients will be able to choose between 3- and 5-door modifications of Defender, its luxury edition and an extreme off-road version. In October of this year, Land Rover shared the pictures of 5-door test-version Defender. Later this year we could find the images of 3-door modification.
The five-door vehicle’s rear multi-link suspension hangs just as low as it does in the three-door version. Lights and baggage doors also look alike. The similarity is simply explained: all four existing prototypes were designed “in the same style”.
According to some sources, the production of the SUV will take place at the Slovakian manufacturing plant, which now produces only Discovery. This supports the assumption that the new Defender will be similar to Land Rover Discovery. Following this logic, the MLA (Modular Longitudinal Architecture) platform, supposedly used for Defender, is the evolution of aluminum D7u platform.
It is interesting that currently, the management of petrochemical corporation Ineos is negotiating with Ford about the possibility of building an off-road vehicle following the Land Rover Defender philosophy at the facilities of an engine factory in Bridgend, South Wales. To do this, they might use the part of the enterprise where engines for Jaguar Land Rover are produced.
In July 2016, the British billionaire and head of Ineos, Jim Ratcliffe, was going to buy from Land Rover the rights for the Defender trademark and part of the assembly line for the production of this SUV. After getting refusal, the businessman decided to develop the Defender-like vehicle called the “Grenadier” independently.
However, we do not think that this vehicle can be a competitor to the new Defender, which we expect to be presented in 2019 and launched on the market in 2020.
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