It was when I nearly reversed into two brand new Land Rover Defenders in the car park at my daughter’s prep school that I realised something was going on. Of course, I had seen them before. I live in Oxfordshire where the A-roads are one long parade of Land Rover Discoveries, Range Rovers and Volvo SUVs from one junction to the next. But recently Defenders seem to be the ‘it’ car on the block. Land Rovers used to connote a certain kind of rarified upper-class masculinity – think Prince Philip, think chins hanging out of them on a shoot – but the new Defender, puffed-up and boxy like a fat peacock, unintentionally parodies what marketeers might pompously call its ‘brand heritage’. One senses that Prince Philip, one of the few to have actually been seen dead in a Land Rover, wouldn’t be having any of it.
Like a Chippendale stripper on wheels, the Land Rover Defender hints at robust masculinity and functionality but delivers on none of it because it doesn’t need to. It is a preening object that works on titillation alone. Just as a stripper touts sex, the Defender advertises something – rugged landscapes, a certain idea of escapism, bizarre off-roading fantasies – that it will never have to make good on. It is what the French philosopher Jacques Derrida would call a ‘floating signifier’. The fact that it has taken root in Oxfordshire, where there is no real mud, says it all.
This fundamental redundancy is at the heart of the SUV philosophy and is nothing new. Think of the term ‘Chelsea tractor’, first coined in 1994 to describe the use of Range Rovers exclusively by women in West London doing the Thomas’s school run. Such is the continued ire directed at Chelsea tractors that London councils have now slapped a surcharge on parking permit fees for owners of SUVs. It doesn’t matter; the side roads of Chelsea and Notting Hill are still stuffed with them, their parking sensors beeping into the void.
But this mismatch of an object to its intended use is not what interests me. Rather, I am interested in the take-up of the new Defender by women. It is largely women that I see driving them today, not men. This could be the time of day at which I travel – when mothers are deployed to the wheel while men are long gone to their offices – but I sense it is something more. Research confirms that in the UK, the number of women buying SUVs has significantly increased, driven, according to car sales website Autotrader, by a preference for higher seating. Women have been consigned to the family Volvo estate for years while men drove sports cars for all sorts of sublimated Freudian reasons. Now they want status cars. And ‘higher ground clearance’, whatever that means. Barely a week goes by when the Telegraph or the Mail do not run an article with a woman defending her Defender as the ‘ultimate midlife crisis vehicle’ with ‘its muscular stance and sculpted lines’, which sounds just as Freudian a predicament as her husband’s Porsche.
Look at the Defender’s advertising, though, and it doesn’t seem to be targeted at women at all – just the usual rather stale pictures of Defenders parked in desert terrain at death-defying angles. Are Land Rover’s advertising brains missing a trick? Why not go the whole hog and advertise the Defender in its true natural habitat of Soho Farmhouse, parked up for a yummy mummy lunch?
On Instagram, vintage Land Rover enthusiast Tati Reed has amassed an enormous following by driving her old Landy ‘Blue Tit’ around the country, riffing on the unlikely juxtaposition of a young woman dabbling in a formerly strictly masculine pursuit. Reed’s charm, of course, is her insouciance – nothing like the knowing menopausal lady motorist at the helm of a new Defender – but it is no coincidence that her star has risen as women take more control in the purchase of cars, particularly SUVs.
School’s out now and the volume of Defenders on the roads near my house has decreased dramatically. I’ll just have to wait for everyone to get back from their ski trips to have another go at reversing into one. Before I do, though, I’ll take a good hard look at my own motivations: am I having a midlife crisis and not-so-secretly longing for a muscular Defender myself, am I affronted on Prince Philip’s behalf, or am I just a woman desperately looking for a kind of metaphorical ‘higher ground clearance’? Definitely the latter.
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