NEW Land Rover Defender: Off-Road Review In Namibia | Carfection 4K

We all know that the new Land Rover Defender will end up on streets like this, the urban jungle, where there is nothing more stressful than dealing with a puddle, a high sidewalk or a herd of Saturday shoppers. Why is it simply because it is desirable, but in order for it to have that appeal, that recognition, it also has to have credibility and to get that, it has to be driven, it has to prove itself somewhere like here. It was clear from the beginning that it was going to be a test like no other. I had experienced it before after dressing up as the human incarnation of 7-ups Fido dido and boarding a mid-sized turboprop, the Beechcraft 1900 D.

Interested? We fly from Namibia's capital, Windhoek, to a poem in the northwestern region of Kanani. of the country, this is where we met our

defender

, an Indus silver p400. From here we would embark on a three-day journey through what I hoped would be not only stunning scenery but, more importantly, some truly challenging terrain because let's be very clear about that. The new

defender

should be reliable and I hope this trip puts him and the other seven in our group under enough stress to eliminate any weaknesses anyway, enough preamble wagons roll first day first impressions. We've done about 65 kilometers, mostly on the gravel

road

set, but I just watched it, it gives some of my initial thoughts because there are a set of things that after three days living with a car you just get used to things, No? and you don't notice them the first time.

What that says is that this car's air suspension, which is pretty much standard on all new Defenders, is amazing. I mean, this isn't fair. A rock type gravel

road

, we're going 60 miles per hour there and it's no less comfortable. on time my little radio feels a little bit of vibration but that just tells you what the road surface is like it's incredibly comfortable other things I really like getting into this the interior is something that yes it's very nice instead we have a screen touch and here is your world away from the old defender, but apparently there is still a shortage, if you look at all the marketing press material you won't see it referenced anywhere, there is an SUV, this is an off-roader, no.

It doesn't feel like it's overloaded with luxury and that's really nice, it feels like it should, this lack of authenticity is even more evident in the minimalist models at the bottom of the range, that's how I would specify mine, without luxuries, just a cloth cover. seats and not even a center console with an armrest and that's why these buttons and the gift letters are all up here too, so you can have this open area down here if you want, but it feels smaller than What you might think this whole army is. Obviously, it's not much better than the old defender, which is, oh, being squished up against this window here and it's a lot more comfortable, but there's still kind of a utilitarian feel to the inside of this, which I really like.

Oh, running ostrich, excuse me while I get excited. God knows what I'll do if we run into a giraffe or a Springbok kudu. I should stick with some Solano ice iBooks, just tick them off, think Bing Bing, it was clearly time for a break and a stroll around our range-topping 110. which came equipped with a crucial set of car-appropriate accessories that we have, we have the Explorer package, you might remember the first packages that you can have with these things, so the black hood decals are the least useful. I think then we are great protectors. It's going down here we have the snorkel, which means you can obviously walk through the water, which we can experience at some point.

The roof rack has a dynamic load capacity of 168 kilos, which is quite a bit to keep going in the corners. all that weight swings up and moves more down here on the other side we have the external storage that is lockable and waterproof so it's easier to jump in and you have it close at hand and, of course, the staircase. This was actually a pretty strange styling detail or people weren't sure about this square here, so if you explore the pattern, it covers a bit, you also get a cover for the rear mounted spare wheel in terms of the general appearance.

As for the car, I think it's really nice to see it, not in a studio or in a set kind of environment, just to see it in this

land

scape. It's a really very attractive car and in the same way that the new Mini captured the Spike Lee but the friendly appearance of its four there, so I think the design of this new defender has an innately adventurous demeanor like its predecessor. Just looking at it makes you want to go off the beaten path, which I just took a quick look at. sat nav and I was expecting it to just be a blank screen and here, really but surprisingly, this is actually a road with a name, this is the d3 703 3703 the 3703 is what I like.

Annie's name is Road I've Been On Before. Well, some other traffic, you see, it's clearly Justin, it's a busy road called or else, it was an incredibly long trail that gave me time to reflect on why some people don't see this as a true successor to an old advocate. Is it the design? Is it the change from a body-on-frame to a monocoque? Is it too modern, too different? Should Land Rover have gone the g-wagen route? I guess what I'm trying to say is that a lot of people have a hard time. I see him as a new defender because it's a big change from the previous one, but I think there's another way to look at it.

Apparently the first time they considered remaking the defenders was in 1971, fifty years ago, and we've had several iterations as they've actually had about six or seven attempts at producing a new defender and this is the one that finally took off and we're driving, so if you imagine all those iterations that maybe should have taken place in the intro, then the step wouldn't seem as big as between the old defender and you. For a quirky comparison, imagine that if Ferrari hadn't brought out any front-engine v12s between the 250 GTO and the super-fast 812, there probably would have been uproar.

It's lost all its charm and character. What's all this grip about and why is it so fast anyway? ways in Namibia the night as I try to surf falls quickly and before we knew it the first day was over fires had been lit and sleep was definitely needed for what awaits us, welcome to the second day at this point, halfway through van threshold pass road, this is the most difficult off-road trail in all of Namibia and you will join me at the top of the most difficult part. Actually I'm a little scared because I basically put my trust in the person who will stay there, he will stay there and the speed is with that hand and then the direction is like this so if I don't look at the camera it's because my life It's in someone else's. hand so I need to really focus on what they're doing so the car is in let's check so I'm going to train there and I selected the rock crawl so I can see that both discs are locked and we have the hill descent like Well, we're in high, so we've got the air suspension up and we're in low gears.

Well, here comes Alex, who will explain to you exactly what is going to happen so you can see where we are going and where we want to go. to be in a low range, which we're in Rock Creek, which of course we are and the hill descent is at a minimum, so if you want to turn it down a couple of clicks so it's right at its lowest point, you probably won't use it for this first time. section once you've passed Matt and continue down you should have been able to take your feet off and let the descent of the hill take you down okay so you can see it's nice slowly nice and smooth you can find gradient release.

The control kicks in if you stop the car on a steep incline, the gradient release control releases the brake slowly, so you may find that you are letting go, it doesn't move, don't be tempted to accelerate, it's okay , it will release smoothly, that's what its release controls are designed to do, we have the correct height settings, yes we are at off-road height so yes we have maximum ground clearance so we are all good and ready to start, okay, great, I'll be watching you. true, I'd literally rather be doing 5th gear oversteer right now because I'd just trash dad.

I think there are some cars on the side of the valley down there. I would have crashed. All my trust is in him. I'm afraid to think what phases they are. In surveys of what he is doing, this Vans Ills Pass is named after Benjamin von Zell. Clearly a crazy Dutchman. Incredibly, he forged this path in the 1920s with a Ford Model T and the help of hundreds of locals, but he travels with people who presumably simply cared about the car that took him there. many months, but the fact that he did it is remarkable, it feels absurd, and even when you were like this and he said, if you can notice that the wheels are not touching the ground and yet he finds tractors and climbs over things and certainly even The steepest speed bumps or twistiest curbs in London shouldn't be a problem;

There was still plenty more of the past to go and I soon discovered that he was tackling substantially tricky sections with all the carefree nonchalance of a baboon scratching its bottom, plus all the suspension and drivetrain tricks. I found one of the most useful things was the screen showing feeds from the off-road cameras which is located under the wing mounts and pointed at the front tires. Those cameras, of course, are also useful for keeping modern 22-inch alloys looking pristine. Through pesky width restrictions, we finally reached the end of the Van Zil Pass and passed onto the stretch of

land

he named after his wife.

This is Marion Phyllis. Wow, look at this, all of a sudden it just goes from red sand to fine white sand here. It is one of the most extraordinary sights I have ever seen in my life. It's fun, although rock climbing is attractive as it's much more similar. This is my babysitter's territory in San. Load with a high ratio a little more speed. The car moves. This suits me. to the ground, the students light up, which may feel parts that are unpleasant, but it is actually also accurate, this for Hollis needs the steering lock that an old defender around here, it would be some kind of scary allergy because, although you would feel more connection, it wouldn't have anything close to the precision that you have in this when this does the slide you had a little bit of blocking and it's there, you know where it is.

I love driving his hand. It's a lot of fun now just to prove it's not. There are really fun games here and what can happen if you have an accident. Here's one we prepared earlier, as they say in Blue Peter, apparently he was fleeing Angola in the war in the 80s and had an accident. He was abandoned, curiously, looks along. here - you can see the inspiration for the new one there, rest or rather rust away in peace after a morning at such a slow speed in the vans, it seemed like we really needed to cover ground here and the defender often drifted in the corners. at 60, 70 or even 80 miles per hour as we headed west towards the coast, followed a dry river bed, then thundered Darren through vast and varied valleys, passed Tut Mountain, saw giraffes, there were landscapes that looked like the moon and there were landscapes that looked like Mars, each new view seemed to try to surpass the previous one for its amazing grandeur.

It was almost a relief to stop for a flat tire when we arrived at camp for the night. I felt almost oversaturated with all the driving I had done. and the things I had seen but of course just because there is no sun doesn't mean there is nothing to see and also light pollution. Stargazing seemed very neat and the advantage of having something with a ladder to a roof rack is that I don't have to mingle with all the scorpions or anything bigger, it's out there. I can work with the Alliance, well, hats and torches to be able to see a staircase that has successfully avoided becoming a midnight meal on wheels.

The golden dawn of the third day saw us entering the Namib, which means vast place, this is the oldest desert in the world dating back at least 50 million years, more specifically, we were heading with a specially granted permit to the coast of skeletons, let's talk about the real car we have here. a defender 110 Valley, obviously, so we know that we will also have the defender 90 and there will be the commercial vehicle and then there will be a lot of weight, however, at the moment we have the high-end gasoline engine, which is the P weighs 400 mm, so it's also a mild hybrid, in fact what that means is that under the bonnet we've got a turbocharged 3-litre six-cylinder petrol engine and then at the back there's aelectric motor that instead of like several others that we have seen and Mercedes has done it, you know, charge the 48 volt electrical system, check for stones, it is not your usual food for carrots, they have to keep an eye on it a little more than I would otherwise.

I was saying make it 400mm and that loads the 48 volt electrical system. It also runs an electric supercharger which obviously helps generate boost pressure. It doesn't do what the EQ and Mercedes boost system does, which is kind of adding power through the electric motor itself, but maybe we'll say it feels nice, its powertrain responds very well, it certainly makes 394 horsepower. of braking and 460 pound-feet of torque and, despite weighing just over eight thousand pounds, it doesn't actually go sixty miles per hour in five point eight seconds, which is pretty impressive. so this defender is really a bit of an off road hatch to that extent, even though this particular 110 weighs about two and a half tonnes with all the kit on the roof, it didn't really drive like the heavy 4x4.

You might expect it's obviously not a Lotus, but the way it responded to the throttle and steering really secured its weight, think perhaps the poletik hippos in Disney's Fantasia and speaking of bulette ik here it's possibly the most ungainly race in the world, he explains why I'm a little breathless on the next part, it's known as the skeleton coast originally because of all the whale bones and fish bones that were washed up here, but then because of all the shipwrecks that have been here, some of which are now They can be found up to two kilometers inland because that is the way the sands have incidentally moved.

This is also home to one of the largest sand dunes in the world and, to put it in perspective, it is almost 400 meters high, the fragment had only 310 meters high. The driving that followed was some of the most demanding I have ever experienced. Speed ​​dust water rocks sand mud deep mud high ratio high suspension concentration and constant adaptation to the terrain were mentally exhausting even if the defender kept me physically much more isolated from impacts than I expected in terms of terrain response modes , we also use rock crawling quite a bit on the sills of the trucks for obvious reasons, we have used the other one a lot and in fact, the one I am in at the moment is the sand mode, we have also used it on the coast of the skeletons, but we went down a river bed.

Right now, the mostly dry and sandy mode is best for this. What it does is, as you can hear, it holds the gear, it also gives you a pretty light throttle for the first 20% and after that. A very responsive throttle, meaning you can be very gentle when pulling away, but also when you suddenly need to have a lot of response to get through the soft sand patch, which, to be honest, can depend entirely on a parent. As you get closer, you get all that feedback right away to help you get through this. Let's bring Locke, hardly David Attenborough, the levels of knowledge there, although I'm not sure he has much to say about cars, and here we can.

I see a new defender in his preferred habitat, born recently. However, he has to adapt quickly if he wants to survive in these harsh environments and then we saw more real wildlife. I think if there is one animal I would have liked to see on this trip, it is it. It would have been a lion, but that second one was an elephant and it's amazing to see, it's a male elephant. I think it's probably not too old and they could live anything up to 50, how exciting, how cool. I have another elephant up here, it's right on our route, maybe here's the pin back, here's a pin back and it starts charging, it'll come for you if they're out, it's a fake charge, needless to say I kept an eye Pay attention to your external radiators.

And this was still on my mind when we finally got stuck a few minutes later, not even past the worst of it, as this video from a few days later shows us finally walking through the water, crawling and swerving way too strangely, the Manchester United. Trading Post, which made me wonder what new defender is considered modern enough like the one we've seen in the player parking lots outside Manchester United here or Chelsea or Arsenal and now we're back to, well, what I'm now ranking en A road in normal life wouldn't be a road, but after what we've been through, it feels like a road and that's really the end of the off-road section of this trip and I'd like to take a minute to think about how the car It has survived the vibrations that this car has gone through before hitting the big impact, we haven't had any warning lights on, it hasn't been serviced every night or anything like that.

Take it with fuel, but yeah, the abuse these can take is phenomenal. One question I asked was how much of this route a Discovery could have done because a lot of people have said, well, this really is just a Discovery 5 in a lumberjack shirt and something. steel toe boots and to that I would say yes, but if you drop a brick on normal shoes then you are not going to walk very far because I think Brian Stann, a discovery in terms of pure traction, could do a lot more if No All this could do in some situations, you would probably need a more skilled driver to do some of the things than you would in this one we'll leave it, but in terms of the departure angles, the breakover angle and the overall robustness, this is a In the previous step we barely touched the underbelly of this, which is extraordinary given what we've been through and some of the progress that in the end you just take for granted and yet it's incredible, to be honest with me and with those.

They're the things the Discovery simply couldn't do, nor any other SUV. Also keep in mind that this has the d7x chassis unlike the Discovery which has the d70 and this is also a little stronger. to that extent, in terms of resistance, like I said before, vibrations, impacts, all that kind of stuff, it also has stronger forearms for when you go over rocks, etc., and what if everything goes wrong on this Namibia area? it is the second least densely populated region in the world behind Mongolia, only 2.6 people per square kilometer, so it wouldn't be much help here to fix all those computers that make this a defender for the 21st century;

Well, the new Defender is capable of running over-the-air software updates and diagnostics for its 14 modules even more reassuringly if there is a fault, then the emergency modes have been specifically designed with a lot more headroom in mind, so they should not exclude you from the capabilities you may need. To be able to get out of any extreme environment or even danger that you find yourself in, to be honest, I felt like I would probably die before the car, given the intensity of the driving we had been doing, it's very tiring because you're constantly looking, you know ? all at once, right in front of you, trying to spot the rock that might puncture you, but also trying to figure out if you need to gain momentum to carry speed through a river or a flooded section and then what's beyond? , your vehicles around.

You're also dealing with the dust from them, you're trying to keep the tires straight and be a little gentle with your actions so as not to add too much lock, but still be aggressive when necessary and it is. That funny thing of being gentle one moment and then really really angry with the car the next that you're used to the road or a circuit, saying the straights are the easy parts, you know, just plant your right foot and go. here just because there isn't a corner doesn't mean you won't have to slow down because you have that extra dimension of es redic there how big is active what does that step do there is that soft ground is hard ground can you do it at full speed or not?

There's a lot to think about and I loved that, but I also found it extremely exhausting over the last few days as we returned to the bustling tropic cousin of a poop at the end. After three incredible days I couldn't help but reflect that I wanted a test of both robustness and capacity for the defender and if we had one, testing him there really is nothing more exhausting than landing in Africa. Obviously a lot more will come from this defender story, for starters we need to drive it more on paved roads, but there's the 90, the commercial, the P has all those things, but for now, this has shown that the new defender feels like in home. here, which is good to know, even if most of them end up finding homes somewhere more like here.