2025 Ineos Grenadier Quartermaster: Is This a Real Pickup?

• Ineos, the SUV maker started by a British billionaire, introduces its second model, a pickup truck variation of the Grenadier "Station Wagon" SUV called the Quartermaster.

• The truck has two comfortable rows of seats but only a five-foot bed, so does that make it a pickup? Debate amongst yourselves.

• We drove it up a good rocky trail in the desert and it did well.

Ineos added 12 inches to the wheelbase of its Grenadier Station Wagon SUV, chopped off the roof in back and, voila, they made the Grenadier Quartermaster pickup truck.

That may be an oversimplification, but maybe not.

The Quartermaster shares most of its componentry with the Grenadier SUV, but it’s just over a foot longer overall. The bed is over five feet long and 5-feet-3 inches wide. Payload is listed at 1,676 pounds, and it’ll tow 7,716 pounds.

Both payload and towing numbers match those of the Grenadier SUV. Flip the tailgate down and it will support 496 pounds. The pickup bed sports four tie-down rings, a 400-watt power takeoff, and you can order a set of utility rails for further cargo versatility.

Some will take glee in pointing out that the abbreviated bed length “ain’t enough,” but for many others it is enough. It all depends on what you need in a rig of this sort.

Ineos has been unequivocal in its defense of the design of both this new truck and the “station wagon,” as they call the Grenadier SUV, saying that both are made to go four-wheeling, not for mall outings. This is a fine idea until you discover some of the beast’s limitations when you do, in fact, try going to the mall.

The most obvious shortcoming is the steering. Any suburban househusband on his way to pick up the kids from soccer practice with a load of sliced oranges in Tupperware will tell you the steering feels “vague, wide, like it requires too much input.” Or, “It wanders around more than I’d like.” Or, “OMG what’s wrong with the steering?”

Ineos defends this by saying the steering, and indeed the entire rig, is designed for real off-roading. There was a guy on our trip, journalist Scott Brady, who had just crossed Africa in an Ineos, for instance.

The Ineos Grenadier and this new Quartermaster are the dream vehicles of English billionaire Sir James Ratcliffe. The right honorable Sir Jim lives in Monaco to avoid taxes, as we all must after a certain income ceiling has been breached, and he has the truck built in France, which kind of takes away from its Britishness if you ask me, but no one asked me.

The idea for it came when it appeared the Land Rover Defender was going away and Land Rover the company wouldn’t let Ratcliffe continue building that vehicle on his own. So, using a drawing on a napkin in a bar called The Grenadier, he built his own car company instead.

As one does.

Thus, with the emphasis on off-road survivability, the steering is recirculating ball. This generally allows for better wheel articulation at the extremes of 4x4 action.

But the Ineos execs at the California launch of the Quartermaster suggested that, had they gone with the more popular and more precise rack-and-pinion steering found on most SUVs nowadays, you would lose your thumbs!

The recirculating ball steering absorbs bangs and bashes of brutal 4-wheeling better, they said. (Just steer with your thumbs outside the steering wheel, I say, and enjoy the better feel of rack-and-pinion.)

For further durability, the axles are solid beams front and rear made by Italian agricultural implement maker Carraro. Eibach makes the progressive-rate springs, and BFGoodrich makes the nearly indestructible, Baja-conquering KO2 off-road tires on the model I drove (more street-able tires are available). A peak at the underside suggests the whole thing is so solid you might not even need wheels, just drag it along on its beefy undercarriage.

But those indestructible axles weigh 330 unsprung pounds each which, combined with the heavy off-road tires and that lazy steering, could be a dealbreaker for a lot of potential buyers, at least the majority of SUV buyers who want something that looks like a Baja Trophy Truck but handles like a passenger sedan.

With this conundrum in mind I set off, first in a Grenadier SUV instead of a Quartermaster, at freeway speed flying down Hwy. 62 from Yucca Valley to Desert Hot Springs out in the California desert.

This is a section of highway that requires your attention no matter what you're driving. Here the Grenadier needed near-paranoid tending-to, with not a moment available for admiring the view, which consisted mostly of cars and trucks that had gone over the side in past years.

But once we reached the bottom and turned left toward the rock-and-dirt challenges of a feature called Berdoo Canyon, the Quartermaster felt more in its element.

You wouldn’t want to take your average crossover utility vehicle here, regardless of what steering it had, and especially if it had low-profile double dubs (stylish 22-inch wheels). In the dirt, with KO2s, the Grenadier felt at home. Knowing how robust the undercarriage was, I didn’t worry about hitting any rocks. I didn’t worry about hitting anything. Things worried about me!

At a couple points in Berdoo we all got to manually shift the center differential into low range, a procedure that required gently rocking the rig forward and backward a couple times, as is often the case with 4x4, both to engage and disengage the transfer case.

Then I reached up onto the Gemini-spacecraft overhead console and engaged the optional diff lock. Locking the rear differential might not have been necessary but it’s what our guides told us to do and I wanted to be a good guest. The switch was right there on the ceiling—yes, the ceiling.

Both the Quartermaster and Grenadier share interiors. While some SUVs—heck, just about all other SUVs—have resorted to highly digital approaches to HMI, where everything is accomplished through a single touchscreen, Ineos went the opposite way.

The dash and ceiling are festooned with buttons and switches, and there are connections ready to insert still more as you add lights and winches and whatever else the aftermarket can come up with for your Grenadier. It was all easily accessible from the comfort of my genuine Recaro seat, and somewhat refreshing with each flip of a toggle.

Halfway up Berdoo I switched from the Grenadier into a Quartermaster. The longer wheelbase might have made maneuverability tougher had this been a more narrow canyon, but there was plenty of room to fit this pickup’s 12 extra inches.

We even hit a few sections where our guides stood in front and did that thing where they angled their flat hands left or right to direct us over and through the rocks. Soon we were up and out of the canyon and barreling through The Geology Tour Road section of Joshua Tree National Park. (Insider Tip: You can get into JTNP free if you four-wheel up Berdoo!)

On both dirt roads and, soon enough, on the park’s paved surfaces, the extra wheelbase of the Quartermaster actually made for a smother ride, and also seemed to minimize the steering vaguery. As with many things in life, I got used to the steering after a while, but I always knew it was there, like some error you spotted in a car article 10 years ago.

Both vehicles are powered by single-turbo BMW B58 straight six-cylinder engines mated to ZF eight-speed transmissions. In one form or another that drivetrain has powered the BMW X5 and more than a million other vehicles, from the 3-, 4-, 5-, and 7-Series to the Toyota GR Supra and Morgan Plus Six.

In the Quartermaster it makes 281 hp at 4,750 rpm and 331 lb-ft of torque from 1,750 to 4,000 rpm. Considering that the Quartermaster tips the scales at close to 6,000 pounds, you might assume that output isn’t enough. Indeed, it takes 8.8 seconds for the 1/4 master to reach 62 mph, roughly twice as slow as any of the X5 variants.

But it’s tuned for offroad applications here in the ¼, not for drag strip launches. Is it enough torque? It felt fine going up Berdoo Canyon and didn’t lack for passing power on the freeway.

Pricing isn’t as high as you might have assumed, given Ineos’ noble Britannic roots. It starts at $86,900, with deliveries coming by the end of the year. The more useable Grenadier Station Wagon/SUV starts at “just” $73,100.

Now, sure, a Jeep Gladiator starts at under $40,000 and also has a five-foot bed. (Heck, even the Honda Ridgeline has a 5-foot-3 bed. The Maverick’s bed is only 4-foot-6. The Lincoln Blackwood’s bed size was a mere 4-foot-8.)

But the Ineos Quartermaster can not only get up and down as many trails as a Gladiator, if Ineos is telling the truth, it may outlast competitors on really, really long off-road adventures. Plus, it has that Britishness that sets it apart from all the crossover utilities parked at the mall, for whatever that’s worth.

Competition is good for everybody. The more choices we all have, the better. So we welcome this latest Ineos product and look forward to more.

So, is it a real pickup truck, or a toy for wealthy plutocrats? Please comment below.