Trundle Anywhere in the 2023 Land Rover Defender V-8

My mind reeled when a Santorini black Land Rover Defender 110 V8 rumbled into my driveway.

“That’s a Defender?”

This modern Defender would look unrecognizable to Land Rover oldheads. Save a few exterior styling elements like the rounded DRLs, tail light stacks, and the general toaster-oven shape of the thing, this new Defender looks nothing like the old one, that frumpy English farmer with wheels. What then do we make of this leather-bound entry in the Defender story? The question isn’t a condemnation, but rather a curiosity.

In 2023, the economics of selling bare-bones SUVs don’t shake out; frumpy farm trucks don’t turn a buck anymore (only the Mahindra Roxor offers truly no-frills motoring to the agricultural set). The real money exists in the top-shelf luxury SUV market, which handed Land Rover a tall task. To meet the expectations placed on any vehicle with a Defender badge, they’d have to rework their rugged, durable, capable icon with enough off-road talent to maintain credibility, but with the comfort and luxury modern shoppers would expect from a Land Rover badge.

It's a tall task, especially in America, where we saw few Defenders over the years; our expectations of the rig coalesced from some hazy Anglophilia. Plus, the Defenders that finally made it stateside never lodged in the public consciousness, so few were they in numbers. Still, this is the tightrope a new Defender must walk: broadcast and reaffirm the Defender owner’s expectations of rugged capability, while offering enough luxury and performance to justify the generous $111,300 MSRP of our test car.

Fortunately, Land Rover nailed the rugged/luxury quotient with its fully redesigned Defender line, which bowed in 2019, is built in Slovakia, then shipped to every corner of the globe. As a bonus, it’s genuinely fun to drive, too.

Modern unibody SUVs like the Defender have become scary good—not so much at hiding their considerable mass—but at corralling it in a way that still encourages you to drive the thing in anger. The BMW X5 M and Porsche Cayenne have been doing it for years. While this V-8 Defender isn’t aimed so squarely at performance figures as those two Übertrucks, it doesn’t lack for composure, and surpasses its German contemporaries for charisma.

A lot of that has to do with the soundtrack. The Defender’s 5.0-liter supercharged V-8 produces 518 hp and 461 lb-ft., routed through a seamless 8-speed automatic. Many of the competitors in the hot-SUV segment produce more power, brake harder, and turn more lateral g’s at every apex, but none of them sound better than the Defender.

The 110 V-8’s exhaust note borrows heavily from the American Muscle playbook, burbly and steady at idle, opening its vast lungs with a throaty roar in the engine’s midrange, but never sounding strained or unrefined. Its voice lends a sense of composure to the driving experience. You don’t hear the supercharger much either. The absence of that trademark whine tends to pull back some of the manic energy that a shrieking supercharger scrrreeeeeee provides. The powertrain gives off Sixties Mustang vibes, with a short, stout torque curve that’s happy to burble along just above idle or explode down the highway at a moment’s notice.

Harnessing all that power can be tricky. I found this Defender’s throttle pedal calibration perplexing, reluctant to get the truck moving beyond a crawl for the first couple inches of pedal travel. You compensate by pressing the pedal down further (at this point, you’re trying to scoot away from a stop sign and merge on to a 40-mph road, traffic barreling toward you), only for the torque to arrive in a wallop that rockets you away from the intersection.

Over the week-long stint in the Defender, I became better at extracting the type of easy, predictable acceleration I’d like out of a torquey V-8 supertruck, but it required more finesse than it should, a tricky little dance wherein you stab enough pedal to get the Defender off the line, then pull your toe away to avoid the sudden lurch of power. It led to more than a bit of frustration while trying to pull away from stops quickly and smoothly.

The brakes were similarly confounding to operate, providing less initial braking force than I asked the pedal for up front, then clamping quickly once a percentage of pedal's travel had been consumed. In stop-and-go interstate traffic, I often felt in danger of rear-ending the car in front of me while reining in the (C/D-estimated) 6100-pound Defender. Even at crawling speeds, when you’d expect a very light application of brake pedal to slow the truck to a complete stop, the Defender just keeps on rolling.

Surely these calibrations were chosen by the engineering team, likely driven by direct customer input. They’re still baffling. I can’t imagine any customer would choose pedals designed to mimic a lightswitch over the adjustability of a rheostat, were they given the opportunity to test both.

That said, it’s a small gripe. Turns out, the Defender rewards quicker deliveries of brake and throttle; you just have to grab it by the mane and leave every cul de sac intersection like you stole the damned thing. Or maybe just get this Defender out of the city, where “rush hour” means two rednecks sharing a single gravel two-lane. That became evident once I escaped Seattle and pointed the Defender at a 700-mile road trip to Eastern Washington and back.