Auto Express 1592

IT’S been a long time coming and is one of the most eagerly anticipated cars in ages, but the covers have finally come off the all-new Land Rover Defender and you can read all about it on page eight. Once again, the Land Rover team has produced a stunning car with huge desirability. I love its rugged, modern looks and some of the clever engineering that has gone into it. Do I want one? You bet. At this point, you’re probably waiting for a big ‘but’ to ride into town, and here it is: I’m not sure the world really needs a new Defender. More to the point, I’m not sure that Jaguar Land Rover does. Let me explain. The market for really utilitarian SUVs like the old model is…

John_McIlroy@dennis.co.uk ● All-new Defender range revealed in long and short wheelbases ● Excellent off-road ability guaranteed, but practicality is boosted REINVENTING the Defender, a car that accounts for Land Rover’s name and heritage, has been a tortuous exercise – one so long that it outlasted the original version of the vehicle, which ceased production in 2016. But Land Rover is hoping that a mix of improved off-road ability and considerable gains in everyday usability, refinement and packaging will help to widen the Defender’s appeal. The new model – which forms the third ‘family’ in the Land Rover line-up, alongside Range Rover and Discovery – is based on a fresh aluminium-intensive platform called D7x. The chassis is described by Land Rover as 95 per cent new, and the firm claims its…

WE’LL have to wait until early 2020 before we can drive a full production Defender, but Auto Express has already been shown some of the car’s tricks from the passenger seat of a prototype (Issue 1,587). There’s an immediately noticeable gain over the old car in interior packaging, because you can sit normally in the new model, with typical levels of shoulder and elbow room for this size of SUV. But once on the move, it’s the refinement that surprises; the test car we experienced around Land Rover’s facility at Gaydon was a petrol model, and its engine pulled strongly and smoothly as the durability team showed us how the car coped with fast running on pock-marked gravel roads. There’s no doubt already that this Defender has the potential to…

John_McIlroy@dennis.co.uk ● All-electric hatch revealed ● Similar size and price to Golf THIS is the Volkswagen ID.3, the German brand’s first purpose-built pure-electric vehicle, and a car that bosses admit could be as important as the original Beetle or the Mk1 Golf. VW’s recent EVs, the e-Golf and e-up!, have both been based on combustion-engined cars. But the ID.3 marks the debut of the company’s MEB architecture, a bespoke pure-electric platform that will eventually underpin dozens of EVs from VW and family members SEAT, Skoda and Audi. The ID.3 is being launched in a single ‘1st Edition’ spec with a 201bhp rear-mounted electric motor and a usable battery capacity of 58kWh. VW claims that gives the car a range of between 186 and 261 miles. All of the 30,000 ‘1st…

John_McIlroy@dennis.co.uk VOLKSWAGEN is “actively considering” a high-performance variant of the ID.3, according to a senior figure that has brought the original concept to production. The ID.3 currently has 201bhp from a single rear-mounted electric motor. But Christine Leuderalbert, VW’s e-mobility product marketing specialist, says the firm is working on how to turn a car engineered for efficiency into one designed for driver thrills. “We’re actively considering it, but we need to do some work on how an electric car can also be a performance car,” Leuderalbert told Auto Express. “We know electric vehicles have excellent acceleration, but we need to look at how the rest of the package would affect the car’s efficiency.” Our exclusive image shows how an ID.3 R could look with the largest 21-inch wheels that the…

Jonathan_Burn@dennis.co.uk ● Concept 4 previews two-door ● More radical look than 3 Series BMW will focus on design and image for the upcoming 4 Series Coupé, and at the Frankfurt Motor Show the German firm gave us a glimpse of the upcoming model with this, the BMW Concept 4. Although it’s only a concept, this show car is 85 per cent representative of what the production-ready 4 Series will look like when it arrives in the middle of next year. Building a concept car for a vehicle that already exists within the product range is a new move from BMW, but the company has said that on this occasion it wants to demonstrate how it plans to distance the next 4 Series from the 3 Series saloon with which it…