Land Rover Experience in the new Defender

[Chicken Drumstick]

A few weeks back I attended a Land Rover Experience at Eastnor Castle. While I've been around Land Rovers all my life, this was actually my first foray to one of their "Experience" centres. I opted for Eastnor, as it is a lovely place and I've trialled there in the past. I also thought it'd make a good day out.

Eastnor Castle is about 2 hrs away from me, all cross country and a lovely drive. My brother was accompanying me and we decided to go in my new Suzuki Jimny. Which incidentally was great to drive there and back.

On arrival the Jimny seemed to spark some interest at the gate. And a couple of other LRE reps also came and spoke to us about it while we were there. I think reinforcing the fact, many/most of them are 4x4 enthusiasts at heart. In the "staff" car park, there were only 4 Land Rover vehicles (maybe 20%). Although I find it interesting that 3 of the 4 were traditional Defenders. The remaining vehicle being a bright orange G4 L322 Range Rover. It would seem that none of the LRE staff actually run a 'modern' Land Rover.....

That aside, the site is lovely and well organised in these rather odd Covid times. Coffee and biscuits were available, before we moved outside for a drivers prep and then split into two groups. One of 4 cars and one of 3 cars (both groups also have a LRE lead vehicle and one following also).

 

The 'drivers' prep talk was without surprise somewhat of an extended sales pitch. Although I was a little amazed at the boarderline slanderous comments made towards Ineos and the Grenadier. I'm not entirely sure the chap speaking should really have been airing such views as an official representative of JLR.

Sadly no Defender 90's present, not even to have a butchers at. But quite a good array of 110's in various specs and trim levels. Using the online configurator I'd pick the green, although in the flesh the colour looks a bit drab and washed out. I did express interest that if I was buying I'd probably prefer something like a solid red paint. To which they said they could probably accommodate that at some point (assuming Autobiography of some kind. Although I hate to think of the cost of this privilege). However I did think the blue looked very good in person.

 

Our stead for the 3 hour experience was this matt covered one.

 

All the cars had a handheld radio in. So it was just me and my brother in the vehicle. What surprised me was, nobody asked at all if we had any off road experience at all.

After a short road trundle, we started out in a farm yard and drove through some wooded areas of the estate, with running commentary over the radio from the LRE guys. We were the group of 3 vehicles. With the LRE group leader also in a Defender and the one at the back in a D5. Once in the farm yard we were into low range, raised ride and Mud & Ruts on the Terrain Response.

While the weather was beautiful for us on the day, there had been torrential rain for many days previous. The tracks were very wet. The two Defenders in front of us were fitted with the optional all terrain tyres, while we only had the road biased rubber.

Obviously the 'Land Rover Experience' is a demonstration track to show off the vehicles. At no point should you really be in any real danger of getting stuck or worse. You can see all the tracks are dug out, prepped and have a healthy layer of hardcore on the base, i.e. plenty of traction for the most part.

That said, it was super wet in the wooded areas and the road tyres were pretty useless and even with the lightest feather touch of the throttle they would spin up and the TCS would kill the throttle. The 1st vehicle in our group (not the LRE leader) did manage to get stuck, but it was clear that they had never driven off road. So when I say stuck, the were going way too slowly on an uphill gradient. And as soon as the wheels span up, the backed off the throttle. The LRE chap soon guided them through. I was fed up of the throttle keep being killed by the electronics, it just didn't feel nice to drive. So unprompted I switched to the Sand mode, which stopped this happening.

We did get to play with the systems a little more. The cameras are pretty cool. But you soon get tired of leaning over and peering down at the middle of dash. As to do this, you have to completely stop looking outside the vehicle.

Another thing with the screens and cameras. It seemed very unintuative, you could click bits of the screen and it'd do something (even if you didn't know it would), but getting back to where you were was a lot harder. I'm not picking on the Defender here, but as a professional software tester I probably take more note of unintuitive software.

The rear view mirror camera is pretty cool. Although when in direct sunlight you end up with a ghost image of the mirror reflection, which makes it hard to see anything at all in it. In the darker woods it worked really well though.

 

About half way round was the most challenging obstacle of the day, a steep rutted decent. Obviously there to demonstrate the HDC. Sadly with it being so muddy and on road tyres, the systems really didn't know what to do and we basically tobogganed down the slope. On better tyres I think the HDC could have kicked in better or in the dry. I think the speed we went down the slope even caught the LRE guys off guard! No harm done though.

With a driver swap over to let my brother have a go, we continued on some gravel tracks enjoying the views and then onto the man made concrete obstacles.

 

 

 

All in all it was a really good and enjoyable day out. If you get the opportunity to have a go yourself, I would highly recommend it.

[Retroanaconda]

Nice write up, sounds like a good day out.

In other modern LRs you can switch off the Dynamic Stability Control which is what cuts the throttle on wheelspin, on the new Defender there is a button on the dash by the gearstick. The manual explains how it can be turned off to aid off-road use, with the usual legal backside-covering warning about making sure you turn it back on again, so I presume the same function is there.