The Land Rover Defender is an anachronism. Evolved from a lineage that reaches back to 1948, and with an all round design and style largely unchanged since 1971, the upright British off-roader has gone from stalwart farm machinery to utilitarian icon. Hell, even Queen Elizabeth II drives one—with a manual transmission, naturally.
Regrettably, this staunch defender of the body-on-frame 4×4 tradition is not lengthy for this world. Land Rover will stop building the Defender at the finish of this year, a 12-mpg victim of tightening efficiency and emissions standards. The Defender is old-school in each and every sense, like the way it turns dead dinosaur juice into forward momentum: inefficiently. In its location, Land Rover plans an whole family of completely modern Defenders.
But while the existing Defender has never ever been a poster child for efficiency, driving dynamics, luxurious appointment, or cutting-edge style, it’s an icon—perhaps precisely because of how charmingly it flouts all of these ideals.
And that is not just a place-on: The Defender’s rigid traditionalism reaches all the way back to the West Midlands factory where every single example is made. No million-dollar 10-axis robots calibrated to balance a sewing needle on its pointy finish right here. Just craft-trained British males and females, hammering, welding, and bolting collectively stamped-aluminum physique parts and brutish mechanical components by hand.
It’s not the fastest way, nor the most effective. And that tends to make it ideal.
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This story originally appeared on roadandtrack.com.
Video: See How Land Rover Assembles the Iconic Defender By Hand
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