The truth about Owning a Land Rover Defender

this is the first time in history that you can make money owning a land rover for a year april 2021 we purchased this land rover defender 90s in chicago at that time we purchased the land rover for just under the msrp of right around 58 000 we have now owned the 90s through four seasons we have also put 12 500 miles on this defender and today we're gonna recapture that year of ownership you could try to play it but you're never gonna beat me look the other way what i'm doing ain't easy bloody and stained from the people who deceive me and audience break through the chains go free me looking for change looking for pain pulling a mob pushing a train i'll never stop stick to a lane pick up the pieces and go rearrange uh i'll be the best above all the rest put me to the tester expect nothing less your checkers i'm chest what's happening a tangible weapon no coming in second this life is a lesson he got a new engine from pain that's a blessing new focus no guessing just hold an obsession all in his possession you got their attention i'll leave an impression and take a redemption just kill no discretion your mind is a weapon 11 11 it's time for regression one year of ownership one year of ownership on this defender it's crazy we've been gone all winter and it's just like six months of ownership just flew right on by yeah we bought this defender before the 90 was popular yeah we've it's still not we barely have seen any of them well that's a whole nother issue yeah you haven't seen a lot of cars in today's auto market but we bought this vehicle before the auto media got a hold of it and made reviews on it and today we're going to recap our year yeah actually one year like i think we might be the only people to own one for a year now that are on youtube so i think we should start going through some of the issues that we had starting with with seat rails speaker one of the first issues that we discovered kind of as new owners in the defender this was a handful of thousands of miles in i would say probably five to six thousand miles as we were moving around in this seat the driver's seat specifically there was a clicking that would occur as you as your body weight transferred there was a clicking well lo and behold there was a recall that came out from land rover there's actually two associated with this specific 90s i can't guarantee if that was part of the 110 or not there's obviously some different seat rails associated with the 90 versus the 110 because of having to get in the back but anyways what was discovered and you're going to see a trend here so make sure you stick with this because we're going to get to the trend and our theory after we wrap up these handful of different items uh after the seat rail was replaced that clicking went away and what was found by the technician what they documented on our paperwork is that the screw which had never been touched before was stripped out and wasn't torqued down all the way i don't know if you guys remember this but we made a video of picking up the defender the the reveal video that we got at defender 90. and as we were driving at home when we made that video straight from the dealership within about five minutes we noticed a rattling noise in the speakers mainly when there was some bass in the song we realized that if we stuck our hand on this speaker we just rested our hand on it the rattling would be entirely gone so we addressed this to the dealer that was local to us and they took apart that panel and they found out that there was a screw that was stripped out from the factory there's another issue that we discovered and i've actually been in conversation with people on the internet about this specific issue and what that was is my wife is the one that actually called this out first i was noticing it but just making the choice to ignore it more or less was there was a crinkling on both sides up here on the windshield and my wife described it which it was a very good description it sounded like sand like you're behind a dump truck and sand is hitting your windshield even though there's no vehicle around to be hitting the windshield that is the noise that would be made once you exceeded about 55 miles per hour and it would do this pretty much every time we drove the vehicle it didn't do it from the factory but after some use this was a continual issue now i brought this up to the dealership and they took the trim off and they looked at things and they determined that maybe they wanted to dive a little deeper into this issue but they didn't because we had to replace a windshield so there's kind of the first flaw of having the defenders if we wanted an oem windshield that would have been months out and if you want other specific items maybe a headlight or a tail light there's a lot of items that in this current market that are specific to the defender are hard to get so we did go with an aftermarket windshield that has all the goodies that the factory one has lo and behold after that windshield was replaced again the factory windshield that noise has went away and hasn't been back since now we're going to get into the pivi pro which is pretty much the next group of issues that we had but you can see with that first group it was a pretty good pattern we had going there all of which had to do with how the vehicle was produced in the factory that it came from yeah so new factory it's it's built side by side it being the defender is built side by side with the discovery the full size one and i'm blanking on the town that this is but it's where volkswagen's got a factory i believe another automaker has the factory there as well and it's a smaller community yeah so by the time land rover put their footprint there and built this beautiful factory all the workers that had that skill set were gone now this is where my theory and opinion comes in so we have this new vehicle that's going down the assembly line for the first time being assembled by people that have never been in this trade like last week they were working at arby's and now this week they're assembling cars holding a socket for the first time and they're stripping out screws and over-torquing things and under-torquing things and we have been to the f-150 factory yeah i don't know if you recall this or not but they would hold a wrench on and the wrench would be held on until a green light would come on yeah and then they'd take the wrench off and that's how like like it's foolproof right well even an f-150 my work truck a 2022 i just changed the mirror out on it and even that had a nut for the mirror that was halfway down the thread yeah i wasn't doing anything completely seized in place see this is why they tell you when you go to tour the f-150 factory no video recording no video recordings so there could be some build quality issues if you think of them as major issues i don't think of them as major issues i think they were all easily resolved very easily resolved and it's very nice that the dealer is so helpful and so kind along the process there yeah and then they just give you one of these nice brand new vehicles to enjoy while yours is getting serviced that was a big perk that yeah you'd pull in and you'd get whatever the latest and greatest jlr brand vehicle is now it's kind of whatever they find in the back of the lot they're giving you at least in our area let's get on to that pivot bro here we are in the front seat of the defender where we have our second group of issues all having to do with this display right here which is powered by the new pivi pro the pivot pro came out in the defender that's the vehicle it was first launched and now it's across the entire board on every single jlr product but as i said it did start in this and now it has a bigger screen as well so this was the first edition now the second one the screen goes up and covers this area and covers this area right here as well but i don't know if you guys remember in a previous video we had we showed a demonstration of what it was doing and it would just go black and not turn on like you a lot of people say to restart the car restart the system either way we couldn't get it to come back on and this happened multiple times we ended up bringing it to the dealer where they said that it didn't need an over-the-air update and everything was up to date but they ended up finding a short in the system they hardwired an update and has not been an issue since but what is very cool about this thing other than that small issue that we had is just the over there updates are fantastic you know you'll see in the forum somebody saying oh today we have a wireless apple carplay and wireless android auto and you come out here and look at that yes you do and the day before that it was wired android auto and app so just just cool things like that it's very similar to to i shouldn't say a tesla because their tech is much more advanced but it's just fun walking out to have some new features the next day piggybacking off of what austin said i do truly enjoy that pivi pro and that android auto and apple carplay and just hitting on that for a moment so my wife has an apple and i have an android both of our phones are synced onto the defender and you can set up which one takes priority and whatnot which is slick but the even cooler thing is and i haven't been in a car there may be a car that works this seamlessly but i have not seen it yet or at least experienced it my wife could be playing and or apple music and i could be driving the vehicle and get text messages through android auto or a phone call and the way that the defender and that heavy pro system just intertwines and intermixes and goes in and out of both the apple and android and bounces back to what it was doing before it works pretty darn slick and i i don't know i view it as a perk and what todd just said goes to show that it is possible in this day and age to have a spouse that does not have both apple or both android it is mind-blowing but it works all blue messages don't matter i'm choosing to make this clip by what i think are some of the best looking tail lights on the auto market right now especially when they're illuminated like they are right now anyways what we have discovered is according to jd power and associates let me just back up here for just one second i asked my wife as she's looking through cars seeing what looks good on the market right now if we were to replace your defender what would it be and she was looking at some jaguars right but she said coming across an article well it says this jaguar is extremely unreliable why would i ever want to buy that i said honey we've owned your defender for one year right now it's been to the shop three times according to jd power and associate that makes this one of the most unreliable vehicles on the road today she said yeah what what do you mean i said honey do you view your defender as unreliable she's like no those were all minor stupid silly things that were easy to fix is the defender unreliable that pretty much summarizes the issues or complaints i don't even know if i could classify them as complaints on our ear of ownership but what we haven't touched base on are just some of the more trivial things do we still enjoy this vehicle this is my wife's daily i would absolutely purchase this vehicle again i would purchase three of them if i knew the market was going to do what it did and them all here's something that's really wild okay so we're right next to a dealership right now that has pretty much this thing's biggest competitor right now which is a two-door ford bronco they have one at the dealer right next to us listed for 77 thousand dollars a first edition with like no miles on it the first edition options in the ford bronco are similar to the entry level options of the defender and i arguably think the defender looks like a much more expensive much fancier much more uh daily uh daily driver type i don't know how to say it the next more livable car yeah it's the next level the next level of a vehicle it's more refined yeah but yet it still has a lot of those similar capabilities two follow-up statements on what you just said this vehicle has been described or not described but it has been confused with being a bronco meaning someone walks up to my wife and says hey i really love your bronco and typically this is a guy and the guy walks away with his shoulders down and his head down because he got told up by a woman that he doesn't know his vehicles also what i would say with this compared to a bronco is exactly reiterating what you just said i would take a basic option a no option defender over a fully optioned bronco that's that's in the uh daily driver sense i should say or in the the weekend car sense the bronco is going to have a much larger aftermarket thing if you are strictly into off-roading i think there's no doubt about that absolutely so still love the way this defender looks it has a design that is going to be on the top of the suv lineup for quite some time that's both exterior and interior absolutely a few other things i can tell you is the storage on the defender is amazing however if you or your significant other is maybe a bit of a hoarder it's got so much storage like especially up on the dashboard that you can just pile sunglasses and bottles of water and cheeseburgers and french fries it's almost like you know that from experience and the storage that's under the armrest you can put more bottles of water and towels and gloves and hats and in the doors you can put more bottles of water in cans and candy canes and candy corn and it just keeps going and going there's a lot of storage which it can be super user friendly and it can also just become this hoarding vehicle it made it through grandma ida's plane trip so it can make it through anything let's talk about that for a second so we've been with the 94 a year this is two doors uh i think it looks completely stellar but there are certain angles when the light just hits it right it looks like like honey i shrunk the defender right yeah going around the roundabout you can see that every now and then if you're in the car behind but there's other times when it just absolutely captures your eye and you're like that thing is cool and it does turn quite a few heads i was even we were zipping down the highway yesterday and just out of the corner of my eye you can see that people are staring at it as they're driving by because it looks like a massive tank because it is once again bigger than the bronco and the wrangler that thing's huge yeah it's super comfortable with that in mind there's plenty of room i love the comfort of it even in the 90 daily driving it it's comfortable and we're on coils i'm actually uh the the the platform that the defender's on is obviously supposed to be an off-road vehicle right absolutely so on air suspension that's going to give you more confidence both on the off-road as well as on-road but the coils like aren't bad i don't regret that at all i'd be lacking the confidence and reliability with the air though there is that as time goes on obviously every person that drives an air suspension is going to think it's better than a coil yeah like it's just plain as dead until they spend 11 grand to fix it right yeah when it hits 100 000 miles and everything's leaking and valves are stuck and whatever else yeah but anyways i don't regret the coils i think they're great i think they're great it's got a good stance to it too gas mileage wise so last summer we were at like 20.4 miles per gallon we got into wintertime started using land rover's app which works great you can set the climate you can start your vehicle wherever it is as long as both you and the vehicle has a sell signal you can also look at your past journeys on that app what your mpgs were where you went how long it took stuff like that i don't know if that has any use other than you can see it took you 23 minutes to get to work one day and 27 the next anyways in the winter time using that app using the heated seats using the heated steering wheel having the fan cranked up uh our gas mileage was as low as 17. yeah that's not very good so we are starting to take it our way back up to that 20 so i would think that if you aren't driving this vehicle in the winter on the four cylinder this is the four cylinder you could expect 20 miles per gallon definitely not the vehicle you want to purchase if you are worried about the current gas prices because it takes premium too it does take premium that's true it has a big old tank too it's got like a 20 uh 23 gallon what does it cost to fill up here filling up at costco yesterday april 2022 in minnesota was 85 okay and our gas prices here in minnesota are very low and costco is just holy when it comes to gas prices you have to go to costco if you don't buy your gas at costco like insider like tip especially if you have a vehicle with premium fuel it's usually 70 cents to 90 cents i've seen it as much as a dollar 30 per gallon less at costco than the neighboring gas stations and another great app to use if you don't have any costco near you is get upside this is not sponsored by get upside but i use it on the daily within the last year i've saved about 330 on it so it's a great app when we talk about the size of the defender 90 as we continue to get towards wrapping this video up we're going to get there and we'll get there we're going to get there we might i promise hopefully i don't regret the the size either so front seats are obviously plenty comfortable i've sat in the back seat twice and i will fully admit at six feet tall i don't want to spend a lot of time in that back seat it's not super comfortable and a lot of that is more the sitting height position than the leg room or anything else it's just the seat is kind of awkward with the height of it is what i observe i spent about uh two trips with 45 minutes each way in the back seat and i was like yeah this kind of sucks a little bit um so this is really a vehicle for two people in my opinion if you had uh you know some younger kids that were out of car seats but not teenagers yet that could be pretty accommodating so they could help themselves to get back up into it but at the end of the day this is an amazing vehicle for driving around town parallel parking parking uh pulling u-turns it's super easy to maneuver because all right short wheelbarrow we're dragging this on i think we're done here i think we're done here thank you guys so much for tuning in to the video here today on performance on wheels one year of ownership might be the last video on the defender never knows who knows uh but we need some comments down below because he needs a new car and he keeps trying to buy one that's like not being produced right now so comment down below on what kind of car he should get but see you guys around enjoy that

Channel: Performance On Wheels

Views: 450,375

Keywords: land rover defender, land rover defender 110, defender 90, defender 110, defender 130, buying a used defender, Defender Reliability, cost of used defender, defender waitlist, Land rover, Land Rover defender review, 2020 Defender, 2021 Defender, 2022 Defender, 2023 Defender, best suv, bronco, luxury suv, Best off road, off road defender, land rover issues, defender mpg, Defender review, defender buyers guide, Land Rover, Pivi pro, land rover a pillar, v8 defender

Id: 122XsXSc70I

Length: 18min 43sec (1123 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 11 2022