Thoughts and musings on the new defender

[FridgeFreezer]

Interesting:

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“If we had wanted to recreate the existing car then we could have moved quicker, but it is our view that for an icon to remain an icon it cannot only look backwards, but must move forwards too,” he said. “The new Defender will move the game on again, and having the benefit for some perspective in order to achieve that should be to our advantage.

 

[Gazzar]

7 hours ago, RedLineMike said:

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/new-land-rover-defender-2019?fbclid=IwAR2hyn1YqYb2RXe-F13__UUTlbQR-UE8ZoXfrss8xbWLGJ7ddSUOqc0DiYw

Nah, hasn't got proper, tested and reliable suspension system. Probably coil springs, or air bags, or hydraulic pistons or some such untested stuff. 

Leaf springs, 2,000 years of road testing. Only way to go.

[Snagger]

I wouldn’t call those tall sidewalls, but that is certainly an improvement over what has been seen before.

[RedLineMike]

3 minutes ago, Snagger said:

I wouldn’t call those tall sidewalls, but that is certainly an improvement over what has been seen before.

There was a little bit of tongue in cheek for those that have been refusing to remove there rose tinted glasses

[Ex Member]

The type of springs is not an issue.  Air springs can be fine. The problem is the short arm independent suspension.  It is horrible for keeping wheels on the ground.  IT only takes 5 minutes off road with anything LR has built in the last 10 years (other than the Defender) to see this.

[deep]

15 hours ago, RedLineMike said:

Seen pictures last night of the test mule rocking steel wheels & tall sidewalls, 

Surely that must appease most of the main doubters 

Phew.

[Tanuki]

This is all very well, but it's taking its time and losing potential customers in the process.

In the last week I've been test-driving a LWB Landcruiser 'commercial', which is sorta the same market-segment Defender 2.0 is targeting.

It passes my "Dogs and Logs" test with flying colours and will cruise at 85/touch 100MPH, but alas only comes with a nasty 4-pot Diesel and manual transmission. If Toyota did a V8 petrol automatic LC Commercial, I'd be waving a £50,000 cheque in their face right now rather than waiting for whatever JLR come up with.

[Bowie69]

Not long now, revealed in September in frankfurt.

[Exmoor Beast]

On 7/31/2019 at 10:20 PM, Bowie69 said:

Not long now, revealed in September in frankfurt.

I saw that, what an underwhelming unveil for such a widely awaited car.

I'd have lined the model range up outside Buckingham Palace or somewhere else iconic overnight and just waited for the media to go bonkers, better still use The Rugby World Cup to launch them.

Will 🙂

[BogMonster]

1 hour ago, Exmoor Beast said:

I saw that, what an underwhelming unveil for such a widely awaited car.

I'd have lined the model range up outside Buckingham Palace or somewhere else iconic overnight and just waited for the media to go bonkers, better still use The Rugby World Cup to launch them.

Will 🙂

Right now, somewhere in Solihull, somebody in a big flouncy shirt is going into meltdown and shouting "WHY DIDN'T WE THINK OF THAT!!!"

[HampshireHog]

14 minutes ago, BogMonster said:

Right now, somewhere in Solihull, somebody in a big flouncy shirt is going into meltdown and shouting "WHY DIDN'T WE THINK OF THAT!!!"

 Young Harry could help , hes got a beard .

[HampshireHog]

Sod it , that's not Harry 

[Anderzander]

20 hours ago, HampshireHog said:

Sod it , that's not Harry 

And after 39 pages of assessment we’ve arrived at the point where we can say it’s not a Defender either 👍🏻

[reb78]

Looks like a dc100

[BogMonster]

3 hours ago, Anderzander said:

And after 39 pages of assessment we’ve arrived at the point where we can say it’s not a Defender either 👍🏻

Are you sure?

I reckon another 10 or 20 pages just to make sure

[deep]

6 hours ago, reb78 said:

Looks like a dc100

No real surprise and not a bad thing, considering what they did to the Range Rover and Discovery.  It could have been very much worse.  (It also could have been much better for many of us who grew to love a family of vehicles which spanned two thirds of a century.  That family was laid to rest over three years ago, sigh.)

The thing with the DC100 was that it was a cool-looking vehicle in its own right but it just wasn't a "proper" Land Rover.  Now that we have accepted the demise of an ancient but useful construction technique, the DC100 concept (or similar) is the best we can hope for in the current environment.

[deep]

6 hours ago, reb78 said:

Looks like a dc100

Remarkably similar...

[Naks]

AutoCar gets a ride in the new Defender: https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/first-ride-2020-land-rover-defender-prototype
 

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The first thing you can think to ask, noting how well the suspension of the new Defender appears to deal with bigger impacts and how composed the body feels when subjected to bigger speeds and lateral loads, is what’s underneath the car: and the answer you’ll get might come as a surprise you.... 

...“Compared with the hardware you’ll find on a Range Rover or Range Rover Sport,” Deeks explains, “there are reinforced suspension subframes, as well as new stronger suspension arms, ball joints and bushes. We’ve got bigger wheel arches, more suspension travel, more wheel articulation and more ground clearance than on any other Land Rover. This car was designed to exceed the usual Land Rover capability targets that our other models are engineered up to. And it has been engineered for better durability and reliability than any car that Land Rover has ever made.”...


... Wheels will vary from 18in to 22in, with both all-terrain and mud-terrain tyres on the options list and bespoke ‘terrain response’ traction control software tuned to make the most of the extra off-road ability those tyres offer.


The car’s four-wheel-drive driveline, meanwhile, will have a more hardcore standard specification than on a like-for-like Discovery, with electronic locking differentials likely for both axles. Land Rover wouldn’t be drawn to confirm whether low-range transfer gearing would be available, or whether the first gear of the car’s eight-speed automatic gearbox was intended to be short enough to take care of even the most testing of off-road demands. But modern auto ’boxes being as they are, there’s a good chance it might.


“The suspension hardware is related to the stuff on those other cars, but it’s very differently applied and tuned,” Deeks goes on. “Steel coils are standard fit, air suspension is optional. But we’ve got special controls monitoring the adaptive dampers, for example, to ensure they don’t overheat when working really hard. If you have the air suspension, we reckon the car is better able to keep its wheels on the ground and its body clear of obstacles than it would on rigid axles anyway.”...


There’s a testing rig used by Land Rover during the development of its modern cars. Company engineers refer to it as ‘6DOF’, which, as Deeks explains, stands for Six Degrees of Freedom. It is, in effect, a very advanced, electronically operated, giant robotic tool than can move a car through every dimension in which it can be moved, either on the road or off it. The six degrees in particular, if you’re interested, are heave, surge, sway, pitch, yaw and roll. Sadly, Kevin Bacon is not involved, but all you’d need is a Ronan, Robbie or Romeo and you’d have a winning boy band line-up, I reckon.


“The testing mileage we do in person, here on the Developing World but also on Tarmac handling courses, on special surfaces like Belgian pavé, and also during kerb strikes, jumps and bottoming impacts, is logged digitally. For ‘L663’, our ‘6DOF’ input calibration was tougher and more punishing than any we’ve used before. Then we feed it into the computer and the rig repeats the inputs, putting the equivalent of 150,000 miles and a decade of extreme stresses and strains into the car, running 24/7, in a matter of weeks. When it’s finished, we tear down the car, see where the weaknesses are and redesign or respecify as necessary.”...

 

Edited August 7, 2019 by Naks

[western]

But they still have no idea what it looks like without the camo applied. All guess work. 

[Mo Murphy]

Man the ramparts !

Mo

[Anderzander]

2 minutes ago, Mo Murphy said:

Man the ramparts !

Mo

I thought they’d have had you at ‘big ball joints’? 

[Mo Murphy]

I think we just have to accept, Stephen that Satan is walking the earth and that the new Defender is one of his many manifestations. 

Don't be led astray, he's a cunning devil.

And there's nothing wrong with big ball joints ...

Mo

[FridgeFreezer]

A couple other good lines in there;

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The old Defender was a car that was durable because it simply wasn’t comfortable enough to drive it quickly off-road.

IMHO he speaks the truth.

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Steel coils are standard fit, air suspension is optional. But we’ve got special controls monitoring the adaptive dampers, for example, to ensure they don’t overheat when working really hard. If you have the air suspension, we reckon the car is better able to keep its wheels on the ground and its body clear of obstacles than it would on rigid axles anyway.

 

[Ed Poore]

On 7/31/2019 at 6:03 PM, Red90 said:

The type of springs is not an issue.  Air springs can be fine. The problem is the short arm independent suspension.  It is horrible for keeping wheels on the ground.  IT only takes 5 minutes off road with anything LR has built in the last 10 years (other than the Defender) to see this.

32 minutes ago, FridgeFreezer said:

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better able to keep its wheels on the ground and its body clear of obstacles than it would on rigid axles anyway.

If you look at the recent (modern) vehicles Land Rover have produced with air suspension you'll see that that is not the case. For example on the L322 when you enable the Terrain Response system it will automatically open up cross-link valves between the air bags. This means that as one wheel gets pushed up the opposite wheels get pushed down as air flows between the bags. I.e. what happens on a solid axle setup. The bonus being that when you disable the system then it goes back to being fully independent suspension which is far superior for road handling.

As to the limitations of travel on the suspension I think it was @Retroanaconda following me on a laning trip in the Lake District. We were going up a climb and the rear wheel kept dropping and dropping way further than a standard Defender setup would do. Once the suspension actually drooped out then the vehicle simply stopped bothering applying power to that wheel, every so often you could see it apply a bit of power and the moment it detected some traction and something under the wheel it applied power back to that wheel.

I still own my Defender but sold the L322 a while back because I didn't really have the space for it (ironically I do now) but in standard setup the L322 knocks the socks off a Defender on the road and in the vast majority of situations off-road too, the main fallacies of it are tyres, width and weight. When I started taking my Range Rover off-road there were basically no options for an all-terrain tyre in 18 or 19". Fast forward 7 years and there's now a lot of options, so whilst they may not have the height of the side-wall the main gripe I had with the tyres was lack of side-wall protection - they were essentially road tyres with a chunky tread. Now BFG and Cooper are all manufacturing tyres with stronger sidewalls in these kinds of tyre sizes. Having the lower sidewall will be more pleasant most of the time on the road and then traction control / suspension designs will likely compensate when you go off-road (i.e. you won't need such a large sidewall because with the traction control you won't need to air down as much).

If we move onto weight then you can see with the L322 -> L405 that Land Rover have done large leaps on that front shaving off almost half a tonne so now an L405 with all it's leather seats, 4.4l engine, air conditioning, infotainment, massaging seats etc is not far off what a 110 weighs. I wouldn't be surprised if the new Defender is lighter than the old.

Now if you look at the width then the only major downside with this is that most tracks in GB (green-lanes, pay and play etc) are predominantly carved out by vehicles with Defender track widths. However for the vast majority of stuff the extra width will be more useful (more spacious cabin despite the sound deadening, insulation etc). I know I'm always peed off by the fact that a station wagon Defender's back-door is not full width, the saving grace is a Defender is a box so you can always pack a surprising amount of stuff in. If you're going off-road then I'd argue that unless you're always in narrow tracks then the extra width is a great stability boost. A simple comparison - Defender at ~70", the L322 and L405 are ~80" but then if you look at what is arguably one of the most capable off-road vehicles in the world (Shannon Campbell's Dragon Slayer) then that has been designed with an close to 90" track. So I wouldn't go knocking the extra width, after winning KoH three times I suspect Shannon know's a thing or two about building a capable off-road vehicle.

[Snagger]

13 hours ago, deep said:

Remarkably similar...

It does, and many will remember how well received that was...

i wonder if it’s still getting sonar.