Land Rover Defender Octa: it’s the real deal

I’ve never been a fan of the Land Rover Defender, seeing it as a pretend off-roader. But this beefed-up variant, the Octa, is the real deal. It’s a hoot to drive. And boy, is it fast …

The Defender Octa

When I was growing up, business was ever so simple. You decided you wanted to be a coal merchant, so you bought some coal for 20 shillings and sold it for 25 shillings. And you used the five shillings you made on every transaction to heat your house and feed your family and buy tangerines, and coal, for your children at Christmas.

Today, though, no one starts a business to take a weekly wage. They start a business so they can sell it as fast as possible. They don’t want a few shillings every week, they want a billion pounds tomorrow. So they don’t necessarily want their business to be profitable, they want it to be valuable. And to me those are two very different things.

The trouble is, I don’t really know what I’m talking about. And to make sure I remain in the dark, businesspeople have a language that only they understand. You know how people in certain pubs in north Wales will switch to Welsh when an English person comes through the door? Well, that’s what happens when I walk into a boardroom.

I know that before I got there they were saying “profit” and “first quarter”. But when they see me coming they switch to “EBITDA” and “Q1”.

As the biggest shareholder I sit on the board of Hawkstone, a beer ­company that turns my barley into lager. It’s become quite successful and now turns lots of British farmers’ barley into lager. This means it needs to be run by professional businesspeople, and that in turn means that when I’m sitting in a board meeting I understand about one word in 17. Someone says “cap X” and I have to quietly google it to find out what it means, and by then they’re talking about “PBT”. Often someone reads out a jumbled-up bit of the alphabet and there’s a chorus of whoops and it’s like I’m watching American football. There’s a sudden burst of excitement and I’ve no idea why.

Another aspect of the business I don’t understand is the range. We started with a beer that everyone liked. So we brought out another and then another, and then a stout. And occasionally I’d put my hand up in the meeting and ask why we were doing this. It just seemed to me like we were competing with ourselves. They would look at me with expressions of pity and reply, “Because the Q3 forecast calls for a Tipte input of 14 and with IBT impacting on the Ewipt, we must act now.”

All of which brings me on to Land Rover. If I was on the board and someone had suggested making a £150,000 special-edition Defender, I’d have interrupted and said, “Why would we make a car that’ll pinch sales only from the Range Rover? That makes no sense.” It turns out, however, that actually it does.

First defence: The Defender from the front. Picture: Supplied

When the new Defender first came along six years ago, I was unimpressed. They’d aped the style and ethos of the original – a car I’ve never liked – but lost the substance.

You only had to look at the fiddly little shopping bag hooks in the boot to know that if you ever used this car as an actual rough-and-tumble off-roader, they’d snap off in about one second.

The car was, I concluded, a fake.

Yet over time I had to admit that while it wasn’t “real”, it was certainly a looker.

I decided it was a cut-price urban understudy to the greatest off-road car of all: the Range Rover.

But here’s the thing. The new Range Rover (and I know this because Lisa has one) is not really an off-roader at all.

Oh, I know that if you go on a shoot you’ll see lots, with their summer tyres, slithering about on the wet grass.

But here at Diddly Squat Farm it feels wrong when you put a sheep in it. Or drive it through the woods. It’s like going hiking in a pair of Jimmy Choos.

It can go off-road, of course. It has the tech and the ground clearance. But mostly it’s for going to the theatre in. And that’s what brings us to the reason why Land Rover has just launched a £150,000 Defender.

Inside the cabin

It’s called the Octa, which means something that made sense in a marketing meeting but nowhere else. So let’s get to the important stuff. Because this is emphatically not just a Defender with a supercharged V8 making 467kW under the bonnet. There’s a lot more to it than that.

First, it comes with bigger wheels than a normal Defender. Much bigger. They’re so big that, to make them fit, Land Rover’s engineers had to move both the front and rear axles. That’s a huge job. They also replaced the anti-roll bars with a hydraulic system, armour-plated the undersides and added the biggest brakes ever seen on any of their cars.

I took it around the farm and it felt like it belonged. It also felt like it was never going to get stuck. Of course, there are compromises on the road. The knobbly tyres are noisy. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you’re going to drive a monster, you have to accept that from time to time it’s going to be a bit roary. You might also expect it to be a bit bouncy, but in fact it rides beautifully. It also feels meaty. Unlike the standard Defender, which feels like a stylish interpretation of the real deal, this is the real deal. And it’s bloody fast as well. The top speed depends on the tyres you fit, but doing 0 to 100km/h in four seconds in a 2.5-tonne car like this is hilarious.

The Octa

Drawbacks? I was amused to see that in the command and control system there’s a facility for measuring your lap times. Which seems odd in a car with off-road tyres. And while we’re on the subject of computer nerds being allowed to fit stuff just because they can, it has the same automatic headlamp dim/dip system you get in a Range Rover. It’s very clever, I’m sure, except it doesn’t work. It blinds everyone coming the other way and if you try to override it you only make everything worse.

The fact is, the Octa is a brilliant car. You sense there’s some proper engineering in the mix, and it looks terrific. It’s also a hoot to drive. Better than a Range Rover? Ooh, that’s a tricky one. The latter is quieter and more civilised, and has that split folding tailgate that provides you with somewhere to sit in the West car park at Twickenham. Whereas the Octa feels like you’re on the field, in the actual scrum.

So, two cars that appear to be similar but aren’t. Is that Land Rover competing with itself? Yes. But it’s also Land Rover giving its customers a choice. Which is why we sell lots of versions of Hawkstone. I think.

LAND ROVER DEFENDER OCTA

ENGINE: 4.4-litre V8 twin-turbo petrol

PERFORMANCE: 0-100km/h 4.0 seconds, top speed 249km/h

PRICE: From $291,500

JEREMY’S RATING: 4 our of 5 stars