Land Rover Defender 90/110

The Defender's shape is not designed so much as inherited. The barrel-curved sides and cill panels are David Bache's from 1958, the headlamps in the wings arrived on the late Series IIA, and the 1983 car added a taller one-piece windscreen, wheelarch eyebrows to cover the wider track, and a front end borrowed in spirit from the Range Rover. Almost nothing after that is new. What changed was the detail, and the details are how you date one. The pre-1990 Ninety and One Ten wear their names in script on the bonnet or wing. Defenders from 1990 carry the badge on the grille. From 2007 the bonnet gains a bulge to clear the Ford engine and the front wings gain vents, which is the fastest way to spot a late car at a distance. The interior tells the same story of grudging progress: wind-up windows from 1984, a proper dashboard, then heated screens and air conditioning, and at the end a car-derived facia in a vehicle whose door apertures were drawn before the Suez crisis. It never stopped being a box, which is why it never dated.

The Defender has a genuine competition record and it belongs to the Camel Trophy. Land Rover took over the event in 1981 with the Range Rover, and from 1984 to 1989 it ran on Land Rover 90 and 110, the coil-sprung trucks in their first years of production. The Camel Trophy was not a race in the ordinary sense, it was a week of winching, rafting and rebuilding vehicles through jungle and mud, and the 90 and 110 did it in front of an international audience every year for six years. That period is why a sand-yellow Defender with a roof rack reads as an expedition vehicle to anyone over forty. There was never a factory racing programme beyond that, and the reason is straightforward. The Defender is a commercial vehicle built to a price, sold to armies, farmers, utilities and aid agencies. Land Rover's motorsport money went where the marketing was, which by 1990 meant the Discovery in the Camel Trophy and later the Freelander. The Defender's competitive life happened instead in the Dakar support convoys, in trials, in rally recovery and in military service, none of which produces a trophy and all of which sold vehicles.

No vehicle carries British institutional life quite like this one. The Defender is the Army's, the police's in Northern Ireland for over forty years, the mountain rescue teams', the coastguard's and the National Trust's. It is also the Royal family's, in a way that produced one of the most affecting images of the last decade: Prince Philip's coffin was carried to the West Steps of St George's Chapel on a custom-built Defender hearse in Edinburgh green, on a Td5 chassis, which the Duke had helped design himself. Elsewhere it is the default vehicle of the safari film, the aid convoy and the field expedition, and the Camel Trophy years put it into six annual televised events across the 1980s. Its ending got the attention its life never quite did. When the last one was built on 29 January 2016, the story ran everywhere, because a vehicle whose basic shape dated to 1948 had finally been beaten by pedestrian-impact and emissions rules rather than by anyone preferring something else. Land Rover marked the seventieth anniversary in 2018 by building 150 Works V8s with a 400bhp Jaguar engine and a price starting at £150,000.

A Defender is easy to own and impossible to ignore. It leaks, it drums, it is noisy at 70mph and the driving position will annoy anyone taller than about six foot two, and none of that is a fault so much as a specification. What actually needs money is the steel: the chassis rots from inside its box sections and the bulkhead rots at the footwells and screen corners, and both are common enough that a galvanised replacement is a normal part of a Defender's life rather than a disaster. The alloy body corrodes where it touches steel, so door bottoms and hinge pillars bubble. Doors sag on their hinges and stop sealing, which is why so many of these vehicles let water in. Mechanically it is tough in a way modern vehicles are not. The 2.25 and 2.5 engines commonly reach 250,000 miles before a rebuild. Tdi cambelts are a strict 60,000-mile item. Td5 cars need a diagnostic tool and can suffer wiring loom and injector harness trouble. Late Duratorq cars are the most refined and the most expensive to fix, with fuel pump failure running past two thousand pounds.