Land Rover Defender L663

The Defender is Land Rover's off-road SUV, relaunched in 2020 as the L663 after a four-year gap. The original Defender, a ladder-frame design with roots in the 1948 Land Rover, ended production in 2016. The L663 that replaced it shares the name and the upright silhouette but almost nothing mechanical.

The defining change is the structure. The L663 is built on a monocoque aluminum platform, Land Rover's D7x, rather than the body-on-frame ladder chassis that defined every Defender before it. Purists treat that as a break with the bloodline. Land Rover's case is that the monocoque is far stiffer than a ladder frame, and that the independent air suspension it allows delivers more wheel travel and better on-road behavior than the old truck ever managed. The Defender keeps permanent four-wheel drive, a two-speed transfer case with low range, a locking center differential, and up to 11.5 inches of ground clearance at the air suspension's off-road height. Wading depth is a published 35.4 inches.

The lineup is organized by body length. The 90 is the short two-door; the 110 is the four-door that sells in the largest numbers; the 130 stretches the body for a third row and eight-passenger seating. Engine options include a 2.0-liter four, a 3.0-liter mild-hybrid inline-six, and a V8. The Octa sits above all of them, a performance flagship with a 626-horsepower twin-turbocharged 4.4-liter V8 and a hydraulically interlinked suspension built for high-speed off-road work.

The Defender competes with the Jeep Wrangler, the Ford Bronco, and the Ineos Grenadier, the last of which deliberately adopted the ladder-frame layout the Defender abandoned. Among that group the Defender is the most expensive and the most composed on pavement, and the air suspension and locking differentials give it real capability once the pavement ends. Land Rover's mixed reliability record remains the open question.