NEW Land Rover Defender: Off-Road Review In Namibia | Carfection 4K

we all know that the new Land Rover Defender will end up on streets like this the urban jungle where there is nothing more stressful to tackle them well a puddle or a high curb or a herd of Saturday shoppers why is that simply because it's desirable but in order for it to have that desirability that kudos it also has to have credibility and in order to get that it has to be driven it has to prove itself somewhere like here [Music] it was clear from the outset that this was going to be a test like nothing I had ever experienced before after dressing as the human embodiment of 7-ups Fido dido and boarding a medium-sized turboprop the Beechcraft 1900 D of you're interested we flew from the capital of namibia Windhoek up to a poem in the northwest Kanani region of the country this is where we met our defender an Indus silver p400 from here we would be embarking on a three-day drive through what I hoped would be not only stunning scenery but more importantly truly testing terrain because let's be very clear about this the new defender needs to be reliable and I hope this journey would put it and the seven others in our group under enough stress to weasel out any weaknesses anyway enough preamble wagons roll first day first impressions we've done about 65 kilometers mostly on the set of gravel roads but I just saw it give some of my initial thoughts because there are set of things that after three days living with a car you just become accustomed to things don't you and you don't don't notice them anymore the first thing says is the air suspension on this car which is pretty much standard across all of the new defenders is amazing I mean this isn't fair rocki sort of gravel road we're doing 60 miles an hour there and it's no less comfortable reason being on time my radius tiny feel a little bit of vibration but that's just telling you what the road surface is like it is amazingly comfortable other things I really like getting into this the interior it's something that yes it's very nice instead we've got a touchscreen and here is your world away from old defender but there's still a sparsity to it apparently if you look through all the marketing press material whatever you won't see it referred to anywhere there's an SUV this is this is an off-roader it doesn't feel like it's been overloaded with luxury and that's that's really nice that feels that's as it should be this sparse authenticity is even more apparent in the pared back bottom of the range models that's how I'd spec mine no frills at all just cloth covering the seats and not even an armrest centre console and that's the reason why these buttons and the gifts letters all up here as well so you can just have this open area down here if you want but it feels smaller than you might think this entire army is obviously not awful lot better than old defender what are oh to be crammed up against this window here and a lot more comfortable but there's still a sort of utilitarian feel to the interior of this which I really like Oh ostrich running excuse me while I get excited heaven knows what I'll do if we stumble across a giraffe or Springbok kudu I should keep a little Solano's ice iBooks just tick them off think Bing Bing clearly it was time for a break and a walk-around of our top of the range 110 which came equipped with one crucial set of accessories appropriately for the car that we've got we have the Explorer pack you may remember the first packs you can have with these things so black bonnet decals the least useful I think we're large protectors then is move down here we have the snorkel so it means you can obviously wade through water which we may get to experience at at some point the roof rack with a dynamic load capacity of 168 kilos which is quite a lot of things to keep going through corners all that weight swinging around up high and move further down here on the other side we have the external storage which is both lockable and waterproof so for sort of given to leap out and you have it there to hand and of course the ladder both of which actually sort of this was quite a odd styling detail or people weren't sure about this square here so if you get explore pattern it sort of covers that up a bit you also get a cover for the rear mounted spare wheel in terms the overall look at the car I think it's really nice to see it out sort of not in a studio or a sort of a set environment just seeing it in this landscape it is a really really good looking car and in the same way that the new mini captured the Spike Lee but friendly appearance of its four there so I think the design of this new defender has an innately adventurous demeanour like its predecessor just looking at it makes you want to head off the beaten track talking of which I just had a quick look at the sat-nav and I kind of expected it just be a blank screen and here really but amazingly this is actually a road with a name this is the d3 703 3703 the 3703 it's what I like Annie named Road I've ever been in before all okay some other traffic traffic you see it's clearly it's Justin it's a busy thoroughfare named or otherwise it was an incredibly long trail which gave me time to ponder why is it that some people don't see this as a true successor to an old defender is it the design is it the switch from a body on frame to a unibody is it just too modern too different should Land Rover have gone down the g-wagen route I suppose what I'm trying to say is that a lot of people struggle to see this as a new defender because it is such a huge step change from the old one but I think there is another way of looking at that apparently the first time they actually considered redoing the defenders it was back in 1971 so fifty years ago and they've had various iterations since they've actually had about six or seven attempts at producing a new defender and this is the one that finally finally has got off the ground and we're driving so if you imagine all those iterations that perhaps should have taken place in the intro then the step wouldn't seem as big as it does between old defender and you for a quirky comparison imagine if Ferrari hadn't brought out any front engine v12 between the 250 GTO and the 812 superfast there would probably have been uproar it's lost all its charm and character what's all this grip and why is it so fast anyway in Namibia night like me trying to surf falls quickly and before we knew it day one was over fires had been lit and sleep was very definitely needed for what lay ahead welcome to day two at the moment on halfway along van sills pass this is the most difficult off-road trail in all of Namibia and you join me at the top of the most difficult bit I'm a little bit scared actually because I'm basically I put my trust in the person that's gonna stand there he's gonna stand there and speed is with that hand and then steering's like that so if I don't look at the camera that you it's because my life is in somebody else's hand so I need to very much concentrate on what they are doing so the car is in let's check so I going to train there and I've selected rock crawl so I can see both disks are locked and we've got the hill descent as well we're in high so in we've got the air suspension raised up and we're in low ratios well here comes Alex who's gonna explain exactly what's going to happen so you can kind of see where we're going and we want to be in low range which we are in Rock Creek which we are of course and hill descent on on minimum so if you want to bring it down a couple of clicks so it's right at its its lowest probably won't use it for this first section once you through Matt and you're carrying on down you should have done be able to take your feet away and let the hill descent take you down okay so you can see it's just nice and slowly nice and gently you may find the gradient release control comes in if you stop the car on a steep slope the gradient release control feathers the brake off slowly so you might find that you're releasing it's not moving don't be tempted to give it any accelerator okay it will release gently that's what it's designed to do its release controls we've got the right height setup yeah we're in off-road height so yeah we've got maximum ground clearance so we're all good and ready to go okay fantastic I will be watching you right I would literally rather be doing a fifth gear oversteer shock right now because just littering dad I think there's some cars off to the side of the valley down there I'd have crashed all my trust is in him I dread to think what phases are in polling what's doing this vans ills Pass is named after Benjamin von Zell he clearly mad Dutchman incredibly he forged this trail in the 1920s with a Model T Ford and the help of hundreds of local himbut rides people who presumably simply cared the car it took him many months but that he did it at all is remarkable that just feels absurd and even when you were sort of out like that and he said if you can tell wheels are off the ground and yet it finds tractors and climbs over things and certainly even the steepest speed humps or gnarliest curbs in London shouldn't pose a problem there was still plenty more of the past to travel and I soon found I was tackling substantially tricky sections with all the carefree nonchalance of a baboon scratching its behind as well as all the suspension and transmission trickery I found one of the most useful things was the screen showing the feeds from the off-road cameras which is situated under the wing bears and pointed the front tires those cameras are of course also useful for keeping trendy 22 inch alloys pristine through pesky width restrictions eventually we did reach the end of Van zil's pass and transitioned onto the stretch of land that he named after his wife this is the Marion Phyllis [Music] Wow look at this suddenly it just goes from red sand to fine white sand up here that is one of the most extraordinary sights I've ever seen now fun though rock crawling is or other engaging as those this is much more like it this is my sitter territory back in San load high ratio bit more speed car moving around this suits me down to the ground the students light which can feel bits that are off-putting but actually it's also accurate this for Hollis steering lock needed than an old defender through here would be kind of terrifying allergy because although you'd feel more connection wouldn't have anything like the precision that you've got in this when this does the slide you had a bit of lock-in and it's right there you know where it is I love driving his hand it's just so much fun now just to show that it's not actually funny games out here and what can happen if you do happen to have an accident here's one we prepared earlier as they say on the Blue Peter this was apparently fleeing Angola in the war in the 80s and had an accident it was abandoned interestingly look along here - you can see the inspiration for the new one in there met rest or rather rust in peace after a morning at such slow speed on vans ills pass it felt like we really needed to cover ground out here and the defender was often drifting through bends at 60 70 or even 80 miles an hour as we headed west towards a coast we followed a dry riverbed then thundered Darren through vast and varied valleys he passed Tutankhamen Mountain we saw giraffe the were landscapes that looked like the moon and there were landscapes that looked like Mars each new vistas seemed to be trying to outdo the previous one for sheer gobsmacking grandeur it was almost a relief to stop for a puncture by the time we got to camp for the night I felt almost oversaturated with all the driving I've done and the things I'd seen but of course no Sun doesn't mean there's nothing to see and so did the light pollution stargazing seemed very much in order and the advantage of having something with a ladder up to a roof rack is that I don't have to mingle with all the scorpions or anything bigger it's out there for that matter I can Alliance job all right hats and torch so I can see a ladder [Music] [Music] having successfully avoided becoming a midnight meal on wheels the golden dawn on day three saw as striking out into the Namib which means vast place this is the world's oldest desert at a vintage of at least 50 million years more specifically we were heading with specially granted permission to the skeleton coast let's talk about the actual car that we have got here it is a defender 110 Valley obviously so we know we're going to get the defense 90 as well and there'll be the commercial vehicle and then there will be ap heav however for the moment we have got the top of the range petrol engine which is the P 400 mm heavy so this is also a mild hybrid in fact what that means is under the bonnet we've got a six-cylinder 3 litre petrol engine with the turbocharger and then on the back of that there is an electric motor which rather like various other ones we've seen and he's done it Mercedes has done it you know it charges the 48 volt electrical system check for the stones not your usual feeds to carrots that do have to watch her a little more than I would do otherwise as I was saying be 400mm and that charges the 48 volts electrical system it also runs an electrical supercharger which obviously helps build boost pressure it doesn't do what the EQ boost system does and Mercedes which is sort of add power through the electric motor itself but perhaps say it feels pretty it's very responsive force engine certainly it's putting out 394 brake horsepower and 460 pounds foot of torque and despite weighing two thousand three hundred kilos just over actually it does not sixty miles an hour in five point eight seconds which is pretty impressive so this defender is really sort of it's an off-road hot hatch to that extent despite this particular 110 coming in at the best part of two and a half tonnes with all the kit on the roof it really didn't drive like the lumbering 4x4 you might expect it's obviously no Lotus but the way it responded to throttle and steering really did belay its weight think perhaps of the poletik hippos in Disney's Fantasia and talking of bulette ik here is possibly the world's most ungainly race it explains why I'm slightly out of breath for this next bit it's known as the skeleton coast originally because of all the whale bones and fish bones that were washed up here but then subsequently for all the shipwrecks that have been here some of which can be now found up to two kilometres inland because that's the way the sands have moved incidentally this is also home to one of the world's largest sand dunes and nearly 400 meters in height to put that in perspective the shard was only 310 meters high the driving that followed was some of the most demanding I've ever experienced speed dust water rocks sand mud deep mud high ratio than high suspension the concentration and constant adaptation to the terrain was mentally exhausting even if the defender kept me physically far more isolated from the impacts than I'd expected in terms of the terrain response modes we also use rock crawl quite a bit in van sills for obvious reasons the other one we've used an awful lot and in fact which I'm in at the moment is the sand mode we've also used it on the skeleton coast but we're came down a riverbed at the moment which is mostly dry and sand mode is the best for this what that does is as you can hear it holds onto the gear it also gives you a very sort of quite a soft throttle for the first sort of 20% and after that a very responsive throttle so it means that you can be very gentle when you're getting away but also then when you need to suddenly have a lot of response to get through the patch of soft sand which can be completely on a parent to be honest as you're approaching it then you've got all that response straightaway to help dig yourself out of it let's bring Locke hardly David Attenborough levels of insight there although I'm not sure he would have much to say about cars and here we can see a new defender in its preferred habitat born only recently it nonetheless has to adapt quickly if it is to survive in these harsh surroundings and then we saw some more actual wildlife [Music] I think if there's one animal I could have wished to see on this trip it would have been a lion but that second was an elephant and it is just amazing to see it that's a bull elephant I think sort of probably not too old and they could live anything up to sort of 50 years old what a thrill so cool we've got another elephant up here he's right on our route maybe here's the pin back here that there's a pin back and starts charging he's coming for you if they're out it's a fake charge needless to say I kept a keen eye on his outboard radiators and this was still on my mind when we eventually finally got stuck a few minutes later we didn't even have the worst of it as this footage for a few days later shows eventually we waded squelch scrabbled and drifted our way too bizarrely the Manchester United Trading Post which made me wonder what a new defender be deemed fashionable enough we've seen in players car parks outside Manchester United over here or Chelsea for that matter or Arsenal and now we're back on - well what I'm now classifying is Road in normal life this wouldn't be a road but after what we've been through this feels like a road and that's really the end of the off road section of this trip and I just like to take a minute to well think about how the car is survived the vibrations that have gone through this car sort of before you get to the big impact we haven't had any warning lights on at all it hasn't been sort of serviced every night or anything like they've just filled it up with fuel but yeah the abuse these can take it's phenomenal one question I did ask was how much of this route could a Discovery have done because a lot of people have said well this really is just a discovery 5 in a lumberjack shirt and some steel toe cap boots and to that I would say well yes but if you drop a brick on some normal shoes then you're not going to walk very far because I think Brian Stann a discovery in terms of sheer traction could do pretty much most if not all of what this could do in some situations you'd probably need a more skilled driver to do some of the things than you would in this let's go drop but in terms of the departure angles the breakover angle and the general robustness this is a step above we've barely touched the underbelly of this which is extraordinary given what we've been through and some of the step ups that by the end you're just taking for granted and yet this it's unbelievable to be honest to me and those are the things where discovery just wouldn't be able to do it or any other SUV for that matter there's also to bear in mind that this has the d7x chassis as opposed to the discovery which has the d70 you and this is also sort of tougher to that extent in terms of standing up to like I said before the vibrations the impacts all that sort of thing it also has stronger lower arms for when you're going over the rocks etc and what if it does all go wrong this area of Namibia is the second least densely populated region in the world behind Mongolia just 2.6 people per square kilometre so out here there wouldn't be much help to fix all those computers that make this a defender for the 21st century well the new defender is capable of running software over-the-air updates and Diagnostics for its 14 modules even more reassuringly if there is a fault then the limp home modes have been specifically designed with much more leeway in mind so it shouldn't lock you out of the capabilities you might need in order to extricate yourself from whatever extreme environment or even danger you're in to be honest I felt like I would probably expire before the car given the intensity of the driving we'd been doing it's so draining because you are constantly looking you know all at once straight ahead of you trying to spot the rock that might give you a puncture but also trying to work out have you got to pick up momentum to carry speed through a river or a flood section and then what's beyond that your vehicles around then you're dealing with the dust from them as well you're trying to keep the tires straight and be sort of gentle smooth with your inputs in order to not add too much lock but equally be aggressive when you need to be and it's it is that curious thing of being gentle at one moment and then really very sort of angry with the car the next you're used on the road or on a circuit say the straights are the easy bits you know just plant your right foot and off you go here just because there isn't a corner doesn't mean you won't have to slow down because you've got that extra dimension of is redic there how big is active what's that step doing there is that soft ground is a hard ground can you go through it at full tilt or not there is so much to think about and I've loved that but also found extremely tiring over the last few days as we rolled back into the bustling relative from the tropic of a poo at the end of three incredible days I couldn't help but reflect I'd wanted a test of both robustness and capability for the defender and boy had we got one his examinations go it really doesn't get much more grueling than over landing through Africa there is obviously a lot more to come from this defender story we need to drive it more on tarmac roads to start with but there's the 90 the commercial the P have all those things but for now what this has proved that the new defender is very at home out here which is somehow good to know even if most of them do end up finding homes somewhere more like here [Music] [Music]

Channel: Carfection

Views: 1,272,261

Rating: 4.8546748 out of 5

Keywords: Carfection, Cars, sports car, engine, review, drive, track, drift, land rover, land rover defender, land rover experience, land rover discovery, offroad, namibia, land rover defender 110, land rover defender 2020, land rover off road, range rover, car review, land rover experience tour 2019, land rover experience namibia, land rover defender review 2019, land rover defender review 2020, land rover off road review, land rover defender offroad, land rover defender works v8 2019 review

Id: CNkb3hAF9R4

Length: 28min 18sec (1698 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 25 2020