The Story
The V8-equipped Land Rover Defender has always been an odd model in the lineup, but now it's gone, will we miss it?.
RRPfrom £97,120Full of personality; can still off-roadNot a particularly sophisticated, or practical package The Land Rover Defender is designed from the ground-up for utility, as a daily-use workhorse for everything from the school run to farm work, but in 2021 its engineers stepped outside of this brief. Years before the performance-focused Octa, Land Rover equipped the…
We had always known that Land Rover would end up shoving a V8 engine into the Defender, but the question was always which V8 it would be, and whether it’d go after AMG’s wild (and wildly popular) G63. You could argue that the Octa is a closer match, and it certainly is on paper, but the Defender V8's old-school character brings it closer to Affalterbach's offering…
Objectively, this is a car that’s able to offer the unusual proposition of one cylinder for every seat; Land Rover offered the V8 in 90, 110 and eight-seat 130 forms. Unusually there were a variety of tunes to choose from depending on the model you opt for, but each and every ‘ordinary’ V8 model comes with JLR’s old 5-litre AJ-V8, equipped with a supercharger for good measure…
At the end of the production run, the short wheelbase 90 V8 was available in P525 or P425 configurations, giving you 518bhp and 419bhp respectively. These numbers sound reasonable, and they are, but when each and every Defender model weighs in the region of 2.5 tons, that power doesn’t go very far – 0-62mph stands at 5.2 and 5.6sec, which is some way behind similarly thirsty…
The 110 is the platform on which the excellent Octa is based, and so it only received one ‘standard’ V8 trim in the P425 which achieves a 5.8sec 0-62mph time – for reference, the Octa manages the sprint in just over 4sec. The 130, essentially an extended wheelbase Defender, received P500 and P425 trims for 493bhp and 418bhp.
Why It Matters
These numbers sound reasonable, and they are, but when each and every Defender model weighs in the region of 2.5 tons, that power doesn’t go very far – 0-62mph stands at 5.2 and 5.6sec, which is some way behind similarly thirsty £100k alternatives.
CarMotion Daily’s Take
You could argue that the Octa is a closer match, and it certainly is on paper, but the Defender V8's old-school character brings it closer to Affalterbach's offering than you might think, for good and bad. Watch this space over the coming weeks.
📝 Source & Copyright Notice
This story was first reported by Evo-GN. For the full article with original photography and complete coverage, visit the source: Read the full story at Evo-GN →