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Thoughts and musings on the new defender


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2 hours ago, FridgeFreezer said:

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.

Really? Not sure what the other vehicles (and other marques) are like in UK style off road conditions, but for pushing on in the Falklands (which means 3rd/4th and sometimes 5th in low range and boot well down) I'd take a Defender over anything else. Discoverys are just big fat barges, with body roll that makes you seasick and front suspension that bottoms out far too easily, and with vicious kick from the anti--roll bar in rock-and-roll terrain. I honestly don't think anything else I have driven in or been driven in comes anywhere near a Defender, though the big Landcruisers seem to ride well if you spend £1000s on the suspension setup and lift them so you can put bigger tyres on.

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It’s a category 4B vehicle

Which means it’s not just a Discovery underneath. “In our terminology 4B means it’s above any other production car, but below full military vehicle specification. The geometry and hard points are the same, but suspension members, bushes, front ball joints and steering are all more durable and robust,” says Deeks

 

Can anybody in the know expand on this rather interesting quote?

It also confirms that it is indeed just a tweaked discovery underneath, slapping some bigger ball joints on an ancient platform which was obviously found lacking in strength hardly inspires confidence. 

Despite everyone telling us how much more travel and how better something is in their opinion, can anybody actually show a picture to support their views that the D7U platform has more articulation than a live axle setup? The spring medium is of almost no consequence, I believe it's the tiny short arms and half shafts which will be the limiting factor. The lack of pictures thus far speaks volumes I think. 

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The leaked document, which appears to be from an internal presentation, reveals that the Defender 110 will be 4,758mm long, 1,916mm tall and 1,999mm wide, while its wheelbase will be 3,022mm (119 inches). Naturally the 90 is more compact, with  an overall length of 4,323mm and a wheelbase of 2,587mm (102 inches). The long-wheelbase 130 model shares its wheelbase with the 110 and its overall length increases to 5,100mm

 

 

That's the most concise writeup I've seen to explain the wheelbases. Why not just call them 100's and 120's to differentiate them from the originals and give them a chance to prove themselves in their own right? 

 

I flat out don't believe the testing has been on real rough ground or there's no way the exhaust could possibly have passed muster being the most exposed and vulnerable component hanging down under the rear subframe just waiting to get crushed. Most of our crossmembers have dents and axles have no paint underneath from hitting the ground, how could anybody think this was a good idea to have an exhaust here? It's literally between a rock and a hard thing!!
It wouldn't get dented on a 6 axis tester I suppose, where are the videos or test results of it boulder bashing across some rivers?

I also disagree with the statement that defenders were durable because they were uncomfortable to drive fast over rough terrain, that's nonsense, they were, and are durable because by virtue of their fairly unique construction they can and could be repaired easily by unskilled labour without special tools. I think the definition of rough terrain needs expanded into actually defining something like the 100m of offset foot high blocks like the Russians use in which case I doubt very much the replacement would fair significantly better.

Despite my negative conjecture thus far, I think the new vehicle will be awesome in the SUV role and will undoubtedly help define the branding structure and bring profit in a way the defender never did. 

 

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6 hours ago, Jamie_grieve said:

 

Despite everyone telling us how much more travel and how better something is in their opinion, can anybody actually show a picture to support their views that the D7U platform has more articulation than a live axle setup? The spring medium is of almost no consequence, I believe it's the tiny short arms and half shafts which will be the limiting factor. The lack of pictures thus far speaks volumes I think. 

I flat out don't believe the testing has been on real rough ground or there's no way the exhaust could possibly have passed muster being the most exposed and vulnerable component hanging down under the rear subframe just waiting to get crushed. Most of our crossmembers have dents and axles have no paint underneath from hitting the ground, how could anybody think this was a good idea to have an exhaust here? It's literally between a rock and a hard thing!!
It wouldn't get dented on a 6 axis tester I suppose, where are the videos or test results of it boulder bashing across some rivers?

I also disagree with the statement that defenders were durable because they were uncomfortable to drive fast over rough terrain, that's nonsense, they were, and are durable because by virtue of their fairly unique construction they can and could be repaired easily by unskilled labour without special tools. I think the definition of rough terrain needs expanded into actually defining something like the 100m of offset foot high blocks like the Russians use in which case I doubt very much the replacement would fair significantly better.

Despite my negative conjecture thus far, I think the new vehicle will be awesome in the SUV role and will undoubtedly help define the branding structure and bring profit in a way the defender never did. 

 

I don't think it does. Both the articulation and the ground clearance claims are almost certainly nonsense. The ground clearance might be 'technically' more but you're comparing the point clearance below a live axle diff  to basically the whole of the underneath of an independently sprung vehicle, so when fully articulated (assuming the cross-linked suspension concept like the Discovery has)  the inside end of the compressed suspension arm is probably going to be very close to the ground.

The reality is that most of the live axle vehicle has much more clearance, which is obvious by looking at it, and is what matters when you are picking your way over hostile rocky ground. Look at the suspension geometry of something like the military Hummer (1/3 arm, 1/3 frame, 1/3  arm) to see what you need to engineer to give real clearance (and as far as I remember even those don't have spectacular articulation). I'd like to see the Defender with suspension fully extended and fully compressed to see what it looks like but the Utah photos and video didn't suggest a lot of travel.

Exhaust: yep. It is probably a casualty of packaging and is probably the best they could do (and in fairness, better than the D3 effort which was very vulnerable at its lowest point). When it ends up  sitting on the exhaust bellied-out, it'll get squashed and either come off completely, or suffocate the engine. 

The old suspension was durable simply because you can clout a live axle on a rock and get away with it most times. I don't believe the same is true of any independent suspension system and certainly not if  it uses aluminium arms - in fact a relatively modest impact could write off the vehicle completely if it twists  the attachment points.  We'll see. The problem is, simulating killing a vehicle in three weeks on a 6 axis tester is basically bolting it to something that hammers the suspension up and down mercilessly. It doesn't rev the engine and drop the clutch, or bash the exposed bits on rocks, or any of the other things that happen when you're pushing the limits in real conditions.

Ultimately your last point is what has defined the vehicle - despite the brochure, it isn't really designed to be taken off road and worked all day every day, and if it was built like a Hummer it would be too expensive to produce and unnecessary for the 99%. All of that can be summed up in one question really: will the Army buy it?

2019-08-08 06_15_07-HMMWV suspension at DuckDuckGo.jpg

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The photo of the test vehicle being recovered from a lay-by suggested failed rear suspension - the back end was low and the wheels had significant camber, the left appearing more cambered than the right as far as I could tell (far from an ideal picture to make such an assessment, though).  I think Bogmonster is quite right.  Besides, complexity adds failure points, and this is a complex car.  But as said before, LR are not interested in military, emergency, utility or over landing markets - they’re “lifestyle “ vehicles for the city set now.  

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2 hours ago, HampshireHog said:

It seems the Red cross have signed up to a fleet of them 

Not likely - it would be a very brave finance director who signs a contract for an unlaunched, unknown, untested fleet without knowing the price - LR are just running through a ticklist of marketing friendly name associations to add perceived weight to the campaign and substance to the product. 

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Eightpot , I don't move in those sorts of circles so I couldn't comment either way  but to be fair id agree with you , only  commenting on some blurb id read ……. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/cars/news/red-cross-tests-new-land-rover-defender-in-the-desert/ar-AAFewGq?ocid=spartanntp                                                                                                                                                                                          

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3 hours ago, HampshireHog said:

It seems the Red cross have signed up to a fleet of them 

I suspect that's "Marketing" and they are getting them at a discount. Potentially even free, with everything bar fuel and insurance thrown in. 

Back in the days when I signed the cheques for a vehicle fleet, the discounts and special deals you could get for parcel of 40-50 vehicles were astonishing. 

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11 hours ago, jeremy996 said:

I suspect that's "Marketing" and they are getting them at a discount. Potentially even free, with everything bar fuel and insurance thrown in. 

Back in the days when I signed the cheques for a vehicle fleet, the discounts and special deals you could get for parcel of 40-50 vehicles were astonishing. 

That was my thought too. No one in their right mind would actually buy a fleet of vehicles like that sight unseen.

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15 hours ago, Eightpot said:

Not likely - it would be a very brave finance director who signs a contract for an unlaunched, unknown, untested fleet without knowing the price - LR are just running through a ticklist of marketing friendly name associations to add perceived weight to the campaign and substance to the product. 

An organisation like that, or a business, absolutely.  A government or civil service run organisation, on the other hand...

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56 minutes ago, Tanuki said:

I doubt they'd be buying them outright, more likely leasing them via one of the big "White Fleet" leasecos in the same way that airlines do with their planes.

Most do that, but not all, and some operate a mix of leased and bought, but it’s a good point and probably right on the money.

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On 8/8/2019 at 7:14 PM, jeremy996 said:

I suspect that's "Marketing" and they are getting them at a discount. Potentially even free, with everything bar fuel and insurance thrown in. 

Back in the days when I signed the cheques for a vehicle fleet, the discounts and special deals you could get for parcel of 40-50 vehicles were astonishing. 

Product placement, probably a fleet of a few dozen vehicles is marketing gold with the right customer. Red Cross, RNLI, maybe even the AA. Of course they'd take them if they were free or super cheap. At one point Land Rover used to more or less give away vehicles to high-profile Foreign Office posts in certain target countries so the Ambassador etc would be seen in a Range Rover. There was an interesting FOI request on the topic a couple of years ago which I was reading at the time. LR get the marketing clout, the FCO get a super-subsidised vehicle.

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But that would now generate cries of corruption, even though its legal and practical, especially from other EU agencies who’d rather we use Mercedes or BMW for our government fleet, just like the EU applied pressure to the UK to scrap our Challenger II MBTs and buy new (obviously German built) Leopard IIs as they’d be cheaper (studiously ignoring the fact that the Challengers were already in service and paid for, along with the parts, training and expertise in the Army).

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1 hour ago, Snagger said:

(studiously ignoring the fact that the Challengers were already in service and paid for, along with the parts, training and expertise in the Army).

They're also considered to have better armour aren't they? Also from what I recall there's only ever need one destroyed and it wasn't by enemy fire but a blue-on-blue incident. There have been injuries due to non-friendly fire but the only tank ever lost was due to another Challenger 2 targeting it.

I hadn't thought about it before but does EU law apply for areas of National Security? I know when that caveat is applied there are a lot of exemptions. One company I have worked for in the past was allowed to "discriminate" against employment to a certain extent due to the fact you needed a security clearance to work there and in order to gain that security clearance you had to be a British Citizen.

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On 8/7/2019 at 12:59 PM, Ed Poore said:

 

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 watched you (Ed) drive your RR at a sedate pace up a badly dug out/cross-axley slope that my standard Defender 90 had just refused twice, at a more enthusiastic pace.  Yes, wheels left the ground, but so did they on my Defender, and you drove to the top while I drove round.   Ed is a carp driver 😜 😘 but the electronics and vehicle dynamics made up for it.

 

D4 had more axle articulation than a 90 or 110 as standard - the most of any LR product at the time apparently.  The downside of some vehicles with independent suspension came sharply home when I took my Freelander2 off-road in Wales with a group of Defender drivers.  The figures suggest that the FL2 has 5mm less ground clearance than a 110 with a Salisbury axle, and it was just about bearable in ruts, but as soon as a situation where breakover angle came into play there was a bit of a scene, with a lot of waffles, piling up of rocks and realising who my friends were!  We got it through, but all the Defenders drove it without help - if not without drama. @Dalai Lama  The Freelander just has the same ground clearance all along, without 'extra' between the axles.

 

I am massively looking forward to the new Defender, though there is no way I will be buying one till the beta testing has been done!  Luckily, several of my friends have deposits down on them so I will get to see them up close.  ...it may even hit Jeep JK/JL values, and I would quite like to try one of those - don't tell though. ;)

Chris

 

P.S. Ed is a great driver really. :)

 

Edited by GBMUD
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3 hours ago, Ed Poore said:

They're also considered to have better armour aren't they? Also from what I recall there's only ever need one destroyed and it wasn't by enemy fire but a blue-on-blue incident. There have been injuries due to non-friendly fire but the only tank ever lost was due to another Challenger 2 targeting it.

I hadn't thought about it before but does EU law apply for areas of National Security? I know when that caveat is applied there are a lot of exemptions. One company I have worked for in the past was allowed to "discriminate" against employment to a certain extent due to the fact you needed a security clearance to work there and in order to gain that security clearance you had to be a British Citizen.

Sorry to everyone else for the tangent.

The Challenger is superior in every way.  The Leopard is built to a budget.  I think you’re right that the rules are national defence is not subject to pan-EU tendering, and certainly the French only buy stuff made in France and the Germans only German made kit if that is an  option - rightly so, supporting their own industries and keeping their public money within their borders.  But that somehow never seems to apply to the UK.  I don’t know if it’s our politicians and civil servants being so incompetent or the EU having rules that are only enforced against the UK (as seen in so many different issues), but we seem to uniquely spend a lot of public money abroad for stuff we could easily employ people to produce domestically.

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Years ago, I worked for a government department which used a lot of 4WD vehicles.  Vehicles were procured via a Government Stores Board contract.  When Toyota got that contract, we were getting their cars so cheap that we could use them for a year or two, then get more than we paid when we sold them on.  I believe the legal people weren't happy and things eventually changed but it was clear the advertising value was worth more to Toyota than the loss on each unit.

Those weren't good years for the staff.  Those Hi Luxes were truly awful off-road and the budget versions we drove were excruciatingly uncomfortable!  The day they drowned my Hi Lux and replaced it with a Nissan was a very happy one.

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23 hours ago, GBMUD said:

The downside of some vehicles with independent suspension

Does the FL2 have air suspension? / Did yours?

That's the crucial bit with the Terrain Response that LR developed, it mimics a solid axle through the use of those cross-link valves (not something I'd heard of on the FL2). Having said that for basically a glorified shopping trolley :ph34r: the FL2 did remarkably well and it was more your (understandable) desire not to trash it that hindered it's progress. It was the same reason why I stopped using the RR for laning trips it was just a little too nice and I didn't / don't have enough disposable income to justify trashing it. Whereas I feel perfectly justified in doing that to the Defender.

The major advantage for me on the Defender is that the same basic design has been around for so long that you can build a vehicle from the ground up on new parts quite easily as there are so many after market suppliers. Hence parts can be sourced readily and at a variety of price points. Case in point - I had the RR for about 4 years and it cost me roughly the same as my Defender has over 9 (except that the Defender has had a new gearbox, transfer box, two new axles with Ashcroft internals / pegged lockers (courtesy of @Hybrid_From_Hell), two engine rebuilds (oops :blush:), two sets of BFG KM2s and two sets of wheels over the course of 130k miles.

I'd be curious to see how a vehicle setup for pure off-road such as Shannon Campbell's Dragon Slayer (see below) compares on technical off-roading vs. a similar vehicle with no IFS. I know he switched to IFS due to the large gains he could make on the high-speed sections. He was willing to compromise the rock-crawling sections of KoH because he could make up so much time in the fast desert sections. I seem to remember a question posed to him or someone else running an IFS car about not airing down to which the response was it's not worth the time taking to air down and back up when you can chuck 800 horses at the problem :hysterical:. Mind you I don't think he falls into the category of an amateur driver having been the first person (and one of two) to win KoH three times.

shannon-campbell-dragon-slayer-5az-nitto-21.thumb.jpg.58eb2755d35f203d843ca3ea06072dad.jpg

23 hours ago, GBMUD said:

P.S. Ed is a great driver really. :)

Awww shucks :blush:

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On 8/10/2019 at 12:16 PM, Snagger said:

 I don’t know if it’s our politicians and civil servants being so incompetent or the EU having rules that are only enforced against the UK (as seen in so many different issues), but we seem to uniquely spend a lot of public money abroad for stuff we could easily employ people to produce domestically.

I work in manufacturing and am as dismayed by the offshoring that various politicians have enabled and encouraged, and I would agree that the UK MOD should by local rather than cheapest, however my only reservation would be if I'm sending a person to war I would want my priories to be 1) best equipment, 2) locally sourced 3) cheapest. 

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On 8/11/2019 at 10:41 AM, Ed Poore said:

I'd be curious to see how a vehicle setup for pure off-road such as Shannon Campbell's Dragon Slayer (see below) compares on technical off-roading vs. a similar vehicle with no IFS. I know he switched to IFS due to the large gains he could make on the high-speed sections. He was willing to compromise the rock-crawling sections of KoH because he could make up so much time in the fast desert sections. I seem to remember a question posed to him or someone else running an IFS car about not airing down to which the response was it's not worth the time taking to air down and back up when you can chuck 800 horses at the problem :hysterical:. Mind you I don't think he falls into the category of an amateur driver having been the first person (and one of two) to win KoH three times.

Curious as to what you mean?

 

are you meaning a solid axle Ultra 4 Vs a IFS Ultra4?

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7 hours ago, Cynic-al said:

, however my only reservation would be if I'm sending a person to war I would want my priories to be 1) best equipment, 2) locally sourced 3) cheapest. 

Or have them do a good job, get them back in one piece, and f**k the source and cost of their kit.

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