Defender 90 Td5 Station Wagon

Jeremy Clarkson

They’re fighting the last war – in slow motion

A couple of years ago my wife decided that although she had some horses, the other twin peak of country living was missing.
So, she declared, we must rush out immediately and buy what everyone calls “a proper old Land Rover”.

I do not understand the appeal. It offers what’s best described as Sealed Knot motoring, giving its devotees an idea of what life
might be like if they had to go about their daily business wearing a full suit of armour. It’s like an automotive gas oven:
big, heavy, cumbersome and completely ill at ease with itself in the modern age.

The car that my wife bought was much better than that. It had silent air screamers on the front fenders, which, as air passes
through them, emit a shriek that’s apparently audible only to any deer or bears that might be in the road up ahead.
It also had tyres on it that were wider than anything found on a Lambo, and even more knobbly than the ones on a tar
sands super truck.

Apparently it had once belonged to the Swiss army, which was also tremendous. It meant it couldn’t have seen much action.

And because of its military pedigree it had full camouflage paintwork, super black tinted windows, an SA80 clipped to the
dash and a 20ft antenna at each corner. It also had a metal roof that could be removed in as little as two days, providing you
had six friends to help you, and a small crane.

Mind you, this was not the biggest drawback. No, the biggest drawback was the fact that, under the hood, it had a kerosene stove,
although someone told me that it was actually a diesel engine. It was — and I’m not exaggerating here — the slowest car ever made.
And so, when it was charged with the task of towing a horsebox laden with Evo-Stick and Araldite — or whatever it is my wifes' horses
are called — it would barely move at all.

Once, on a not-too challenging hill it just stopped. Honestly, there was more horsepower in the trailer.

This caused many rows. Last year, for instance, I set off in it on December 10 to buy a Christmas tree and I didn’t get back 'til April.

I hated that car. I hated the heavy steering, and the fact that every time you closed the door it smashed your shoulder into several
small pieces. I hated the lack of legroom, and the way the 1.5 horsepower kerosene stove managed to make more noise than the
Hoover dam.

Passengers, too, were worried about the sharp edges in the cabin, which they reckoned would be a serious issue in a crash.
Chance would be a fine thing; you need to have some speed to have an accident, and our Land Rover wouldn’t even go fast
enough to get the air screamers working. Not that this was a problem, because even if you came round a corner at full speed,
a tortoise would have time to amble out of your way.

Eventually I won the day and my wife agreed to swap this stupid car for one with an engine. A big one.

So, because there are plenty of Land Rovers lying around, and plenty of old V8 engines.
We simply bought the two entities — for next to nothing — and asked a man we knew to join them together.

I should explain that the V8 we found was not a 3.5 litre. We got ourselves a 3.9, which is much better. It’s also fitted with
carburettors so, if it goes wrong — and it will because it was made by communist trade union members
 — it can be fixed with the only item in my toolkit. A hammer.

Apparently it’s very easy to fit a V8 into a Land Rover and even easier to fit a lever on the dash that directs the exhaust
gasses either down past the catalytic converters and the muffler, or if you pull it, along a length of ventilation tubing.

No muffler. No cats. Just 5mpg and without doubt the best noise in the world.

And because we’ve fitted all the cool military stuff from the previous model, it looks pretty snazzy as well.

However, despite all the noise and the brouhaha and the “don’t mess with me” combat exterior, it still accelerates with the
verve and pizzazz of a coral reef.

Maybe this is an unavoidable problem. Maybe the Land Rover is like a heavy and unwieldy deep-sea diving suit; you
can fill it with the world’s fittest and strongest man but he’s still not going to win any running races.

To find out, I borrowed a new Land Rover. It came with electric windows and heated seats and lots of other creature comforts,
and it was finished in a natty silver paint job that made it look very Yorkville.

It also had a relatively modern five-cylinder turbodiesel engine that produces lots and lots of torque. You can feel it when the
turbo blows, like a herculean inner strength, an invisible trebuchet that would be capable of freeing you and your suit of armour
from the pit of any bog, from the jaws of nature’s iciest grip.

But power? No. It still hasn’t got any. You have to drive everywhere with your rear-view mirror full of headlights dancing hither
and thither as people behind look desperately for a way past.

It also has a set of gear ratios that may be fine in Kenora in February but are no good anywhere else. Often fourth isn’t enough
to get you up a hill, so you drop down to third and it feels as though you’ve been hit in the back with a wrecking ball. All of a sudden
you’re doing 35mph but your eight-ton suit of armour, making a noise that sounds like the birth of the universe, has come to an
almost dead stop.

What’s more, there still isn’t enough room behind the wheel for anyone with shoulders or legs, there are still sharp edges,
it’s as bouncy as a small dog at suppertime, and as a result it’s about as much fun to drive as a punctured wheelbarrow.
And it’s not like the misery is short-lived, because each trip to the shops can, and does, take two or three weeks.

So why, in the name of all that’s holy, doesn’t Land Rover simply stop making the Defender and replace it with something
that actually works? Something that’s still designed for Banff but has space for your shoulders.

I’ll tell you why. It’s because they’re suffering from a British disease called Mini Syndrome.

All of us are terrified of change.

It’s why we have a royal family. Of course it’s nonsense to hand over the reins of the nation to someone just because they
were born in a castle.

Then you have the Mini. For years the original version soldiered on because to change it would mean ditching 40 years of tradition.
And that wouldn’t have been on.

As a result the company went bust and along came the Germans, who demonstrated with the new Mini that tradition doesn’t
necessarily mean driving to work in the automotive equivalent of rickets.

We see exactly the same with the “proper old Land Rover”. It’s rubbish: uncomfortable, slow, impractical and not that cheap.
But nobody has the courage to pull the plug on a 60-year tradition, and start again. But somebody should.