New king… or pretender to the throne?

The old-shape Defender was the undisputed king of off-road vehicles. Ever since Land Rover announced that it was set to die, however, there’s been a power vacuum which the new model, like it or loathe it, has never really tried to fill. Step forward, then, the first and only vehicle from a manufacturer other than Land Rover you’ll ever see featured in these pages…

Words: Alan Kidd

Pics: Ineos Automotive ou know the story by now. Land Rover pulled the plug on the original efender. im Ratcliffe, billionaire owner of the Ineos group, wanted to buy the tooling so he could keep on making it. They knocked him back, so he decided to build a successor to it from scratch.

We never thought we’d see the day when we did an article about a vehicle that’s not a Land Rover. We wouldn’t write about a eep, or a Su uki, or a Toyota yet here we are delivering our first impressions of the Ineos renadier into the heart of the Land Rover community.

It sounds like a vanity pro ect, but you don’t get to be the world’s richest Land Rover fan by chucking money around. Sir im saw a gap in the market, commissioned a feasibility study and, liking what he saw, gathered together a stellar team of e perienced motor industry leaders and engineers to make it happen. e got a massive result when Mercedes- en offered him a raging deal on a state-of-the-art factory and workforce, all ready to start building the vehicle, and now here we are. In the length of time it takes an established manufacturer to develop a new model, Ineos Automotive has gone from a sketch on the back of a beer mat to a fully functioning car maker.

And now it has a fully functioning car.

The renadier is on sale and on the road, with first deliveries having gone out in early anuary. Land Rover pulled the plug on the old efender with this truck, Ineos aims to have pushed it back in.

We’re not here to guff on about Ineos’ business model, future plans or any of that. We’re all about driving the renadier, and asking one simple uestion does it succeed in picking up where the old efender left off?

Where was that? The efender had become an uneasy combination of trendy styling and agricultural engineering. eople wanted the same honesty but with things like cabin space and comfort, and since this was fundamentally impossible to achieve Land Rover did the same as countless aftermarket styling houses and chucked loads of bling at what was, still, a cramped, noisy old truck. et you sit in a comfortable seat which has plenty of leg and elbow room. So do the people in the back. It has sound deadening, and a dashboard. A proper one, designed around a proper media screen but with big chunky switches you can operate while wearing work gloves. ere’s the split in its personality that turns out not to be a split at all. The old efender trained us to think that if you wanted to drive the best off-roader around, you had to suffer for the privilege the new one trains us to think that if you don’t want to suffer, you won’t get the best off-roader around. The renadier is here to tell you that you can have the best of both worlds. ou definitely know it’s a truck, though. Ineos is offering it with a choice of petrol and diesel engines, both . -litre MW units mated to an eightspeed auto, and there’s noticeably more drivetrain vibration in the latter. ou won’t mind that one bit if you know your off-roaders, and it’s like a sewing machine compared to an old-shape efender, but if you want it smooth the petrol will appeal more.

What the efender needed was a reset. Land Rover gave it one, of course, the result being a vehicle that’s fantastic in all sorts of ways but completely abandons the truck-like simplicity of old. Ineos’ aim is for the renadier to be another kind of reset the kind you’re more likely to appreciate if you liked the old efender the way it was. The way it was in , perhaps So the renadier takes up the story with a ladder chassis, live a les and as many mechanical components as possible. The handbrake and transfer bo are both operated by physical levers. The number of microchips on board is a fraction of that on the modern efender. Its body is s uared off and bo y, designed to avoid damaging itself in e treme terrain.

Ineos set out its stall to create a vehicle that would do what the original efender once did but in a modern package with all the right creature comforts. ot a lu ury , but one which you could use as a daily driver without having to suffer and take off-road without having to compromise.

The first thing to say is that its refinement on the open road is pretty impressive. It’s decently smooth all round and uiet enough that when you drive one with the optional roof rack fitted, your ears will instantly know about it.

That didn’t trouble us, but the renadier’s steering certainly did. It feels lifeless both about the straight-ahead position and as you start to turn in, the latter before loading up suddenly.

This has various results. ne is that it never settles into a straight line instead, you’re constantly teasing the wheel back and forth to keep it on track. The second is that when you come out of a straight and turn into a corner, it’s so lacking in feel that your mind tells you you’ve gone into understeer. Then finally the weight all arrives at once and now your mind’s telling you that you’ve gone into oversteer instead. ou’ve not. ut it doesn’t feel natural and it doesn’t feel nice.

Things are much better on tight -roads when you’re going constantly from lock to lock. In this case, the weight in the wheel is pretty much constant, making for a much more pleasing and even uite entertaining e perience. ody roll is well controlled and its planted stance comes with no end of grip.

Which engine is better for this kind of driving? Well, the auto bo masks most of the differences between them and so does some e cellent sound deadening which means the diesel makes hardly any more noise, but ultimately both are strong as an o . The petrol unit puts out bhp and lbf.ft, the latter from rpm, while for the diesel it’s bhp and lbf.ft from ust rpm the official figures say . seconds and . seconds respectively, but what matters is that whether you’re fully laden with logs and chainsaws or hauling three and a half tonnes of trailer, it’s going to shift whatever you ask it to.

With the diesel engine, you feel some e tra tor ue as you s uee e the throttle. With the petrol, there’s a more insistent pull through the mid-range and when you bang the same pedal down to the floor. ut honestly, there’s not much in it.

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While we’re on the sub ect of figures, even in the world of hardcore off-roaders it’s probably been a while since you saw a new vehicle whose fuel consumption figures don’t make it beyond the teens. That’s the slightly uncomfortable truth about the petrol model, though . - . mpg, the book says, along with emissions of - g km.

The oil-burner is a little more palatable here, returning . - . mpg and putting out - g km. iven the price of diesel, though, there’s not going to be a lot in it.

The difference between the engines does seem to become more apparent when you take the renadier off-road. Which, it won’t have escaped your notice, is where it’s designed to e cel.

We’ll get to the engines in a minute. ut let’s start with the bit that really matters in an off-roader.

In each case, the vehicle is held up by coil springs rather than airbags. A good start, that. They’re located by fivelink systems all round Ineos’ design engineers did consider using three-link at the back, they say, but concluded that it would be too unruly and traded that level of articulation for better manners on the road.

We’ll say here that on the launch event we attended, the renadier’s suspension was never given the chance to fle out. There was loads of off-roading, all of it the sort of stuff that made the efender a legend, but nothing we’d call e treme. It was lengthy, varied, spectacular and as natural’ as you’re ever going to get in ritain, with some deepish ruts, a little mud, a few mild rocks and plenty of steep gradients. ut if you know green lanes like arkamoor, Tilberthwaite, Stanage dge and the top end of Rudland Rigg used to be before the ampaign to Stop verything crushed them beneath their ackboots, any one of them would have been by far the most technical part of the launch.

As you might well know, all these lanes have been driven time and again by standard efenders without locking diffs. The renadier is available with these, which is brilliant a ma or criticism of the old efender was that Land Rover refused ever to offer it with them , and the instructors on the launch had us banging them in and out non-stop, which is fair enough as a demonstration but to be honest we’d have backed it to cover every last scrap of the ground we were shown without ever needing us to touch them.

We’d suggest that they’re a musthave if you want to get the best from the vehicle, but having said that it will still do great things without them. That’s because it does an e traordinarily good ob of matching the old efender’s ability to maintain a very high baseline level of traction.

The key here is its suspension, which follows the ground with a nice, natural flow. ack to what we were saying about the five-link rear, here. We loved the three-link system Land Rover used to use, which can hardly help but allow better wheel travel, but the renadier does remain very compliant over uneven terrain and faster, looser ground alike. It makes the sort of unflustered progress the old efender was famous for, which is about the highest praise we can give it. ven in the petrol model, however, while driving it off-road we kept on remarking to ourselves how similar it was to being in an old-shape . The fluency with which it covers the ground is the same, the feeling of natural movement beneath you that comes from having two beam a les working together in harmony. It feels very, very at home on rough trails and virgin ground alike. ne area in particular in which it ecels is climbing. The combination of low tor ue and an auto bo means you can take it steady and not go in too hot for fear of running out of steam. bviously, keeping your momentum up is still necessary, but doing so is very easy when all you need to do is s uee e the throttle and the response will be there. oing down the other side is another matter. The renadier’s auto bo is a good one, and when you put in low first it stays there but that’s not enough for it to be able to creep down the steepest hills the way an old efender would. To aid it here, it has hill descent control, which works very well when you can get it to work at all.

We mentioned earlier that the auto bo masks most of the difference between the engines, however for lowspeed off-road work the diesel comes to the fore as the easier vehicle to drive smoothly. Its deeper tor ue means almost no throttle at all is re uired much of the time, certainly on technical sections that you take at a crawl. ere, the petrol unit needs ust a little more and the throttle is uite sensitive, meaning it’s harder to drive smoothly.

What? The problem is with the diff locks. It takes a pronounced difference in wheel speeds for these to disengage so you need to go round a proper corner before they’ll come back out. If you’ve used them to get up a hill, they’re liable still to be in as you drop down the other side which is fine, but while the lights are still lit the hill descent control won’t engage. ot ideal if you’ve got nowhere to turn literally and the track ahead goes straight down a gradient so steep you couldn’t walk it. ne of the great things about the old efender is that you can put it in low first and it will crawl down the steepest hills imaginable. o uestions asked. Still, so long as you can actually engage it, the renadier’s hill descent control does an e cellent ob of keeping the vehicle from running away. We’d miss the elegant simplicity of ust shift- ing a manual bo into first, but with no lurching at all as the system compensates for shifting loads at the wheels you have to nod with appreciation at its use of technology to do the same thing and, truth to tell, to do it better. ver the piece, the renadier is very sure-footed and tractable, stable and steady over rough ground and easy to manoeuvre but also, no small matter, involving to drive. espite having a wheelbase, it’s significantly more agile than a , in particular in tight corners, and with approach, departure and breakover angles of . , . and . degrees it’s similarly well proportioned to keep itself out of trouble on the roughest terrain. To put it succinctly, it’s ust like being in an old-shape efender only one which doesn’t deafen you and has a nice cabin. verall, the uality of the cabin is very good. The materials and switchgear are stout and tactile and the trim is solid, with the fit and finish you’d e pect from an established car maker rather than one starting out with its first ever model. It’s not perfect but overall it feels very, very good and is e actly what we’ve been hoping for. All the things that were good about the original efender are here most of what was bad about it are not. an that be said for the renadier in general? ery nearly, yes. It puts you in mind of the vehicle that inspired it when you’re driving off-road but moves the game a long way forward on tarmac, and the e uipment you get is purposeful and high in uality without ever coming across as a way of blinding you with science to ustify a big ticket.

Talking of that, the renadier has e cellent Recaro seats which keep you comfortable all day long. Its driving position is very efender-like, the difference being that you can actually stretch your legs all the way straight while sitting in the driver’s seat.

Rear seating is ade uate in the Station Wagon, with very deeply sculpted seat-backs making room for your knees, but the five-seat tility Wagon will be less generous as the second row here is mounted further forward to create the necessary cargo space behind it. The seats themselves remain good, though.

Much has been said about the vehicle’s cabin design, which is self-consciously chunky and rugged. There’s an e cellent media system integrated into the dash but you still have huge banks of buttons both in the facia and the roof console. These are definitely not for everyone, but if you appreciate what the vehicle itself is about we think you’ll get the point of the cabin too. It’s functional without being devoid of form and, no small matter, it works.

The ticket is big all the same, of course. It costs from , in twoseat tility form and , as a fiveseat commercial, with the price umping to , for the passenger-carrying Station Wagon. We managed to get the latter up to , on the configurator by adding a winch, towball, roof rack, light bar and rock sliders as well as a medium-priced paint option.

So the spiritual successor to the efender has turned out to be almost as e pensive as the actual successor to the efender. It does give you a hell of a lot of off-roader for your money, though and if it comes through on the promise of longevity Ineos has made for it, you will be able to treat it the last car you ever need to buy.

In this way, it’s e actly like the old efender, whose rebuildability has been key to make it a legend. The difference being that you hear no end of people lamenting the fact that they’re too old to be able to cope with a efender any more. With all that it gives you, the renadier need never feel like that.

We never thought we’d see the day when we did an article about a vehicle that’s not a Land Rover. et here we are delivering our first impressions of a vehicle which, you might say, actually is one. It might not have the badge on the bonnet but the renadier is more of a Land Rover, in the original sense, than anything that’s worn the green oval in seven years.