SIMON SAYS

by Simon Hastelow

When you read about the details of the new Defender V8 earlier in this mag you probably muttered “How much?!” like most other people. It is true that, compared to a base spec New Defender, it is not that much of a higher price tag for such an awesome package, but that’s only because the base spec. version is also way overpriced.

I have never bought a brand new Land Rover, in fact the only new car I ever bought was a 2013 Fiat Panda. We needed a runabout and the dealership were offering them at £99 deposit and £99 per month. At the time I was spending anywhere between £200-£300 per month in diesel alone for my two Land Rovers so I could just about categorise the Panda as free motoring.

Other than that, the closest I got to a new car was buying an ex-demo 1997 Land Rover Discovery S 300TDi Auto which was just 6 months old. It cost me £22,000 and the new price was around £28,000. It was mid-range in the Land Rover fleet; not a pauper-spec car, but neither was it a Range Rover. I could have bought a similar age Defender 110 for a bit less money; equating that to prices/values at the time it was less than my annual salary and easily affordable.

However, in the intervening 24 years the prices of similar cars from Land Rover have more than doubled, but my income, or even the national average income, has not. To drive away even a basic Discovery I would need to find a deposit of £12,000, pay £550 every month for four years and still owe £24,000 at the end of it. More than the cost of my 300TDi Discovery in 1997!

The Bank of England figures show that just accounting for inflation alone my original £22,000 Discovery should now cost around £40,000, but the base spec Discovery is £54,000. A base spec. New Defender 110 is lower at £46,000, but goes right up to £82,000 for a higher spec model! That would have been Top Spec. Range Rover money when I bought my Discovery.!

The company has clearly left us behind and is going after much wealthier clientele. How could I ever justify spending more per month, on a car finance PCP, than I do on my mortgage?

And another thing!

Although I was excited to see the spec of the V8 Defender, and had a few minutes of ‘what if...’ running through my head, it did make me wonder about the timing of the news.

Just a few days previously Jaguar Land Rover made a big fuss about their plans to go purely electric across the board. Stealing the thunder from other manufacturers by getting in first guaranteed them good news coverage, but then they tease us with a 525hp supercharged V8 Defender!

How does that fit into the plan?

Well, for us in the UK and Europe, it doesn’t. The V8 will still be built and probably sell well in other markets, while we’re all fitting charging points to our garage walls or trailing extension leads across the driveway.

I’m not anti-electric, I do think it is the way to go, and even in a few short years the technology and infrastructure will be worlds apart from what we see even today. But the Defender V8 announcement does clearly illustrate that it is only due to government legislation that manufacturers are switching to plugin cars.

If there was no 2030 deadline then the manufacturers would probably all still be complaining that it’s impossible to switch and they’d still be pouring R&D into diesel and petrol technology instead of electric and hydrogen.

Sometimes governments get it right.