The Clarkson review — the Land Rover Defender Octa is ‘the real deal'

Times

a day ago

When I was growing up, business was ever so simple. You decided you wanted to be a coal merchant, so you bought some coal for 20 shillings and sold it for 25 shillings. And then you used the 5 shillings you made on every transaction to heat your house and feed your family and buy tangerines, and coal, for your children at Christmas.
Today, though, no one starts a business to take a weekly wage. Or pass it on to their kids. They start a business so they can sell it as fast as possible. They don't want a few shillings every week. They want a billion pounds tomorrow. So they don't necessarily want their business to be profitable. They want it to be valuable. And to me those are two very different things.
The trouble is, I don't really know what I'm talking about. And to make sure I remain in the dark, businesspeople have invented a language that only they understand. You know how people in certain pubs in north Wales will switch to Welsh when an English person comes through the door. Well, that's what happens when I walk into a boardroom. I know that before I got there they were saying 'profit' and 'first quarter'. But when they see me coming, they switch to 'ebitda' and 'Q1'.
As the biggest shareholder I sit on the board of Hawkstone, which is a company that turns my barley into lager. It's become quite successful and now turns lots of British farmers' barley into lager. This means it needs to be run by professional businesspeople, and that in turn means that when I'm sitting in a board meeting, I understand about one word in seventeen.
Someone says 'cap X' and I have to quietly google that to find out what it means, and by then they're talking about 'PBT'. Often someone reads out a jumbled-up bit of the alphabet and there's a chorus of whoops and high-fives and it's like I'm watching American football. There's a sudden burst of excitement and I've no idea why.
Another aspect of the business I don't understand is the range. We started with a beer that everyone liked. So we brought out another and then another, and then a stout. And occasionally I'd put my hand up in the meeting and ask why we were doing this. It just seemed to me like we were competing with ourselves. They would look at me with expressions of pity and reply, 'Because the Q3 forecast calls for a Tipte input of 14 and with IBT impacting on the Ewipt, we must act now.'
All of which brings me on to Land Rover. If I was on the board and someone had suggested making a £150,000 Defender, I'd have interrupted and said, 'Why would we make a car that will pinch sales only from the Range Rover? That makes no sense.' It turns out, however, that actually it does.
When the new Defender first came along six years ago, I was unimpressed. They'd aped the style and ethos of the original — a car I've never liked — but lost the substance. You only had to look at the fiddly little shopping bag hooks in the boot to know that if you ever used this car as an actual rough-and-tumble off-roader, they'd snap off in about one second. The car was, I concluded, a fake.
Over time I had to admit that while it wasn't 'real', it was certainly a looker. I decided it was a cut-price urban understudy to the greatest off- road car of all: the Range Rover.
But here's the thing. The new Range Rover, and I know this because Lisa has one, is not really an off-roader at all. Oh, I know that if you go on a shoot you'll see lots, with their summer tyres, slithering about on the wet grass. But here at Diddly Squat it feels wrong when you put a sheep in it. Or drive it through a wood. It's like going rambling in a pair of Jimmy Choos.
It can go off-road, of course. It has the tech and the ground clearance. But mostly it's for going to the theatre in. And that's what brings us to the reason why Land Rover has just launched a £150,000 Defender.
It's called the Octa, which means something that made sense in a marketing meeting but nowhere else. So let's get to the important stuff. Because this is emphatically not just a Defender with a supercharged 626bhp V8 under the bonnet. There's a lot more to it than that.
First, it comes with bigger wheels than a normal Defender. Much bigger. They're so big that, to make them fit, Land Rover's engineers had to move both the front and rear axles. That's a huge job. They also replaced the antiroll bars with a hydraulic system, and fiddled with the control arms, links and knuckles. They also armour-plated the undersides and added the biggest brakes ever seen on any of their cars.
I took it around the farm and it felt like it belonged. It also felt like it was never going to get stuck. So does this mean there are compromises on the road? Yes. The knobbly tyres are noisy. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. If you're going to drive a monster, you have to accept that from time to time it's going to be a bit roary. You might also expect it to be a bit bouncy. But it rides beautifully.
It also feels meaty. Unlike the standard Defender, which feels like a stylish interpretation of the real deal, this is the real deal. And it's bloody fast as well. The top speed depends on the tyres you fit, but doing 0 to 62mph in four seconds in a 2.5-tonne car like this is hilarious.
Drawbacks? I was amused to see that in the command and control system there's a facility for measuring your lap times. Which seems odd in a car with off-road tyres. And while we are on the subject of computer nerds being allowed to fit stuff just because they can, it has the same automatic headlamp dim/dip system you get in a Range Rover. It's very clever, I'm sure, except it doesn't work. It blinds everyone coming the other way and if you try to override it you only make everything worse.
The fact is, the Octa is a brilliant car. You sense there's some proper engineering in the mix and, thanks to its new flared wheel arches, it looks better than ever. It's also a hoot to drive. Better than a Range Rover? Ooh, that's a tricky one. The Range Rover is quieter, more civilised and has that split folding tailgate that provides you with somewhere to sit in the West car park at Twickenham. Whereas the Octa feels like you're on the pitch, in the actual scrum.
So, two cars that appear to be similar but aren't. Is that Land Rover competing with itself? Yes. But it's also Land Rover giving its customers a choice. Which is why we sell lots of versions of Hawkstone. I think.