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The first thing you can think to ask, noting how well the suspension of the new Defender appears to deal with bigger impacts and how composed the body feels when subjected to bigger speeds and lateral loads, is what’s underneath the car: and the answer you’ll get might come as a surprise you....

...“Compared with the hardware you’ll find on a Range Rover or Range Rover Sport,” Deeks explains, “there are reinforced suspension subframes, as well as new stronger suspension arms, ball joints and bushes. We’ve got bigger wheel arches, more suspension travel, more wheel articulation and more ground clearance than on any other Land Rover. This car was designed to exceed the usual Land Rover capability targets that our other models are engineered up to. And it has been engineered for better durability and reliability than any car that Land Rover has ever made.”...


... Wheels will vary from 18in to 22in, with both all-terrain and mud-terrain tyres on the options list and bespoke ‘terrain response’ traction control software tuned to make the most of the extra off-road ability those tyres offer.


The car’s four-wheel-drive driveline, meanwhile, will have a more hardcore standard specification than on a like-for-like Discovery, with electronic locking differentials likely for both axles. Land Rover wouldn’t be drawn to confirm whether low-range transfer gearing would be available, or whether the first gear of the car’s eight-speed automatic gearbox was intended to be short enough to take care of even the most testing of off-road demands. But modern auto ’boxes being as they are, there’s a good chance it might.


“The suspension hardware is related to the stuff on those other cars, but it’s very differently applied and tuned,” Deeks goes on. “Steel coils are standard fit, air suspension is optional. But we’ve got special controls monitoring the adaptive dampers, for example, to ensure they don’t overheat when working really hard. If you have the air suspension, we reckon the car is better able to keep its wheels on the ground and its body clear of obstacles than it would on rigid axles anyway.”...


There’s a testing rig used by Land Rover during the development of its modern cars. Company engineers refer to it as ‘6DOF’, which, as Deeks explains, stands for Six Degrees of Freedom. It is, in effect, a very advanced, electronically operated, giant robotic tool than can move a car through every dimension in which it can be moved, either on the road or off it. The six degrees in particular, if you’re interested, are heave, surge, sway, pitch, yaw and roll. Sadly, Kevin Bacon is not involved, but all you’d need is a Ronan, Robbie or Romeo and you’d have a winning boy band line-up, I reckon.


“The testing mileage we do in person, here on the Developing World but also on Tarmac handling courses, on special surfaces like Belgian pavé, and also during kerb strikes, jumps and bottoming impacts, is logged digitally. For ‘L663’, our ‘6DOF’ input calibration was tougher and more punishing than any we’ve used before. Then we feed it into the computer and the rig repeats the inputs, putting the equivalent of 150,000 miles and a decade of extreme stresses and strains into the car, running 24/7, in a matter of weeks. When it’s finished, we tear down the car, see where the weaknesses are and redesign or respecify as necessary.”...

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2010 Defender Puma 90 + BAS remap + Alive IC + Slickshift + Ashcroft ATB rear
2015 Range Rover Sport V8 Supercharged



Defender Puma Workshop Manual: https://bit.ly/2zZ1en9
Discovery 4 Workshop Manual: https://bit.ly/2zXrtKO
Range Rover/Sport L320/L322/L494 Workshop Manual: https://bit.ly/2zc58JQ