When Land Rover finally axed its ‘old’ Defender in 2016 and promised to replace it with something better, traditionalists shed tears as readily as their beloved old-school Landys dripped oil. And the arrival of the ‘new’ Defender in early 2020 did nothing to help: ‘too expensive’, said some; ‘too complicated’, said others. ‘Too precious’, they moaned. ‘Not a real Defender’, they concluded.
Oddly, it seemed, such people really did want to carry on driving a car based on a 70-year-old design that was bereft of safety features, as aerodynamic as a breeze block, as draughty as a shed, rusted readily underneath and with the turning circle of a tanker.
But one person decided to do something about the obvious gap in the market left by the demise of the old Defender – and that was Sir Jim Ratcliffe, chairman of Ineos Group and often named as one of the UK’s wealthiest people.
Initially Sir Jim offered to buy the rights and tooling to carry on building the old Defender, but Jaguar Land Rover turned him down flat. So in 2017, while indulging in a pint or two at the Grenadier pub near the Ineos offices in Belgravia, he decided to build his own off-roader that would be new from the ground up and would address all the shortcomings of the old Defender while retaining its rugged, utilitarian nature.
In honour of where the idea was conceived, the car would be called the Ineos Grenadier – and, less than six years since those pints were pulled, it’s up, running and in production as a more practical proposition for tackling roads less travelled than today’s luxurious ‘soft roader’ SUVs.
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