The Land Rover Defender 130 Has Eight Seats You Can Actually Use

As I pulled into the “Destination Defender” event’s dirt lots, I panicked, approaching my appointed roosting space. Despite kicking the terrain selector up to mud, the all-season tires on our all-new Land Rover Defender 130’s 20-inch wheels spun and slid. Luckily, I came in with momentum and skidded into a spot on a slight ridge.

In Upstate New York, the sun was shining, and the temperatures climbed into the mid-60s. This was ideal, if unusually warm, for mid-November. However, Hurricane Nicole, the 14th named storm of the year’s Atlantic season, had wended its way up the eastern seaboard and dumped a month of rain the previous night.

The mud was deep enough to subsume the soles of my boots and place the dark stain of environmental degradation on my soul as well.

The event was, as the name implies, a celebration of all things Defender: a rugged, immensely capable, all-wheel-drive vehicle with roots back to the founding of the Land Rover brand in the immediate post-war era as a Jeep for the British gentry. Original design Defender derivatives were in production consistently until 2016. Even here, though they weren’t always available in the U.S., the affection for these old trucks is reverential. They are beloved despite (or because of) their lack of comfort, sophistication, and on-road manners. If All Cars Are Drag, and they are, the Defender is Salomon hiking boot couture.

The “new” Defender, introduced in 2020, adjusts that reputation for the modern age when everything is an SUV, and every SUV must be able to do everything. Or at least look like it can.

While the Defender lost some of the arcane signifiers of off-road capability—like a solid rear axle and body-on-frame construction—it retains amazing prowess and adds a deluxe-yet-rugged interior and on-road refinement that trounces its nearest competitors, the Jeep Wrangler and Ford Bronco. Both of those Americans feel, behave, and sound on streets and highways, about as sophisticated as a Neolithic bullock cart.

The 130 I was driving is the latest and largest iteration of the new Defender family, which already includes the classically stubby two-door 90 and the extended-wheelbase four-door 110. All three lengths have decades of Land Rover heritage, with the numerological assignations corresponding roughly to the wheelbase in inches. This practice has been dispatched. Similarly, though the 130 was offered only as an open-bed pickup in the past, this new incarnation is not only a closed SUV, it shares its wheelbase with the 110. It is, however, extended, with an extra 13.4 inches grafted on behind its rear wheels.