Grenadier wrote:

^^^ More to the point, why do LR consider this important for their most capable ‘off-road’ vehicle? Why have they spent money on achieving this? Yet again this highlights the brands desire to move LR away from its roots. If you want to ‘drift’ a V8 from the JLR stable you choose a F-Type. If you want to drive in luxury you choose a XR or FFRR. If you want to off road you choose a Defender. Blending all three is just nonsense. Utter nonsense.

Perfectly said... why they bought out the New Defender and put in on the same price bracket as 80% of all their other cars I will never know. All you have to do is look at how New Defender is cannibalising sales from D5 and RRS ... what a c%*k up in Marketing and all that GERRY talk of having different families of models; defender, discovery etc.... BS. The unattractive Discovery 5 is dead and the sales show that.

LRSpain004 wrote:

Perfectly said... why they bought out the New Defender and put in on the same price bracket as 80% of all their other cars I will never know. All you have to do is look at how New Defender is cannibalising sales from D5 and RRS ... what a c%*k up in Marketing and all that GERRY talk of having different families of models; defender, discovery etc.... BS. The unattractive Discovery 5 is dead and the sales show that.

Well there are a couple of reasons I can think of.

The New Defender does have 'important differences' to the D5/RRS/lowspec-FFRR which means it appeals to additional sectors that the others a potential purchaser would not go near. The fact of the matter, is that it is more 'offroad biased'both in capability and visually. So that alone will atract more people to the brand. Its not actually that important sales elsewhere are cannibalised - as long as the grand total (volumes and revenue) for JLR increase then thats a good thing. The EMC puts the same engines in all models. Ellesmere Port and Nitra can build multiple vehicle designs equally. Lines may not be refreshed (D5 is vulnerable here as we know), but if the R&R cost is aready sunk one xisting models, who cares?

And then there is commonality across models to ease the R&D cost - the D7 platform. The myriad of sh*t that comes of out VAG's ultimate badge-engineering approach in almost every market sector, based on about 3 platforms prove this approach wrks - and they've stopped even trying to distinguish the brands in some cases (see Q2 vs T-ROC stupidity where you really are just paying for 4 circle badge with the Q2) - that reminds of the Austin 1100 (BMC ADO16) and its Morris/Wolseley/Riley/MG twins) from the 60's/70's.

BMW are another brand who now have a very wide market sector spread with tiny tiny differences between an M this or a 4 series that. Do they care that a their ugly X4 or GT takes sales from the 5 series line? Its the way of the world. Steve N | 21MY Defender | 08MY Discovery 3 (history) | 06MY Discovery 3 (ancient history)

Supacat wrote:

Where is a normal punter, even with the money to purchase one of these, going to be able to do that. On the public roads?

Grenadier wrote:

^^^ More to the point, why do LR consider this important for their most capable ‘off-road’ vehicle? Why have they spent money on achieving this? Yet again this highlights the brands desire to move LR away from its roots. If you want to ‘drift’ a V8 from the JLR stable you choose a F-Type. If you want to drive in luxury you choose a XR or FFRR. If you want to off road you choose a Defender. Blending all three is just nonsense. Utter nonsense.

I do think they look very nice:

Click image to enlarge

Click image to enlarge

Nitroneil wrote:

A car is a car

Nitroneil wrote:

The fact that the same basic car can be a mud and rock crawler but also hold its own Nuremburg seems to me a good thing.

I'm sure Gerry would be impressed with the verticality of those flags...

Click image to enlarge