Frankfurt 2019: Land Rover officially debuts new Defender
Upright, quasi-retro design links Land Rover’s urbanised present with its adventure-bound past
Car Design News was on the ground at the Frankfurt Motor Show when Land Rover unveiled its redesigned icon: the highly anticipated 2020 Defender.
Squint at the boxy profile and you could be looking at the iconic Land Rover Defender off-roader that ran with minimal updates for 67 years. Refocus, however, and the new Defender emerges as a thoroughly modern activity vehicle, albeit one with a much larger price tag than its utilitarian ancestor.
“This is a Defender for a new age – respectful of its past but not harnessed by it,” Land Rover’s head of design, Gerry McGovern said in a statement.
Plenty about the new Defender, unveiled today at the Frankfurt motor show, references the old model. The short wheelbase 90 and longer wheelbase 110 both borrow the naming strategy of the old car, which was discontinued in 2016. A spare wheel is fixed to the vertical rear door, which again swings open sideways. As before, the front overhang is minimal, to both aid its off-road agility and connect it visually to its forbear.
Inside, the car is available with the option of a middle seat across the front to fit three, creating a six-seater out of the three-door 90 model and 110. The 110 is also available with a third row of seats. A longer 130 is planned for a later date with eight seats.
The interior might be high-tech, but the dashboard is defined by an integral, exposed metal beam that includes grab handles and keeps the analogue feel, despite advanced levels of connectivity available. Flooring options include mop-clean rubber.
Land Rover wants us to be drawn to the simplicity of the vehicle’s shape, and then seduced by the underlying modernity. “The overall impression is of an elemental design, yet this clean reductive approach is underpinned by sophisticated surfacing of the highest quality,” McGovern said.
The most eye-catching element of the exterior is perhaps the ‘floating pillars’, two body-coloured squares standard on the 110 and optional on the 90 that create a wider C-pillar. These act as both a stylistic device to reduce the boxiness, particularly of the 90, and an anchor point for some of the more off-road oriented extras, such as the roof ladder and the side-mounted storage pod.
The range of extras available are the widest ever available on a Land Rover, the company said. This allows customers to personalise their vehicle to an extent that would only have been possible by going to the aftermarket on previous models, a move that both cuts modifiers off at the knees and creates different personalities for the vehicles.
Land Rover has arranged them into four different packs. ‘Explorer’ focuses on extreme off-roading with extras like a raised air intake and a roof rack. Urban adds bigger wheels, up to 22in, and more brightwork. ‘Country’ is a more toned-down, gentleman-farmer spec, with additions like ‘classic’ mud flaps. There was no detail on ‘Adventure’, only that it promises “to take you off the beaten track”.
Other options include a satin wrap for the paintwork, described as for protection but also offering more colour choices. At the other end of the scale, a range of options hark back to the Defender’s workhorse past, including steel wheels, a roof-rack, chequerplate detailing on the bonnet and an electric winch.
The price of modernised nostalgia is steep. The 90 will start from around £40,000, a 58 percent increase on the £25,265 start price of the previous 90 in 2016, the year it was discontinued. The 110 will cost from £45,240 pounds, a 64 percent jump on equivalent model in 2016.
We’ll know more when the configurator goes live about individual pricing, but expect the entry car to come with a four-cylinder, 2.0 petrol. The range of engines is another big change; the four-cylinder petrol, available in two power outputs, will joined by a four-cylinder diesel and two in-line six-cylinder engines – one petrol, one diesel. A plug-in hybrid version is also in the pipeline.
The car is no longer built on a ladder frame chassis but uses a modified version of the aluminium monocoque platform used by the Discovery, with which it shares a factory in Nitra, Slovakia.
The naming system was based on the previous model’s wheelbase in inches, but the new model is much bigger. The three-door 90 is 4583mm long, more than half a meter longer than the old model. Its wheelbase measures 2587mm (101 inches). The five-door 110 meanwhile is 5018mm long, with a 3022mm wheelbase (118in).