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When Land Rover launched the new Defender, with its flimsy hooks for shopping bags and underbody protection made from Fisher Price offcuts, many enthusiasts of the old model were jolly cross. They wanted their Land Rover to be uncomfortable, with sharp edges and nowhere to put your right shoulder. They wanted to believe that if the mood took them they could drive their car to Timbuktu.
One of these people was Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the successful and charismatic boss of a chemicals business called Ineos. However, rather than simply sit in the Dog and Brexiteer with his muddy friends, moaning over a pint of brown beer about how the world had pretty much given up on making proper off-road cars, he decided to make one. And I’ve driven it.
I should say at the outset that I like the idea of Sir Jim. I’ve never met him but despite his anti-EU views he seems like a decent cove. He has a northern accent and likes fracking, which makes him a good egg in my book. And rather than playing golf, which is what most businessmen do when they’ve made a couple of quid (and incidentally reached No 2 in The Sunday Times Rich List), he sails through the Northwest Passage or he rides a motorcycle through the Andes.
Also, last year he very kindly sponsored the public launch of my Hawkstone beer. It’s possible that Ratcliffe likes a pint. He has even named his new car after his favourite London pub: the Grenadier.
Some say the car in question looks a bit like a Mercedes G-wagen but it really doesn’t. As you can see from the photographs, it looks so exactly like an old Defender you can see why Land Rover made all sorts of legal noises when they first saw the design sketches.
And the similarities are not skin deep either. Because unlike all the so-called off-roaders you can buy today, the Grenadier has a full box-section ladder-frame chassis, recirculating ball steering and heavy-duty solid beam axles, which come to you from the people who make axles for John Deere tractors. An Audi Q7 this is not. It’s a hammer, and I’m not talking about that puny little thing Andy Dufresne used to tunnel out of Shawshank. I’m talking about the sort of hammer they use to get rusted pins out of ships’ anchors.
Watch the Ineos Grenadier in action
Even the power plant is punchy. In my car it was a turbocharged 3.0 litre BMW unit that ran on petrol and delivered 282 brake horsepowers. But you can have a similarly sized diesel if you want less and enjoy poisoning things. Both feed their grunt to an eight-speed gearbox.
On the outside there are mounting points to which a range of outdoorsy things such as tables and tents and lighting rigs can be attached. And there’s a ladder for getting on the roof. And the top of each front wing is flat so it can be used as a seat, or as a resting place for a mug of restorative Bovril.
I particularly enjoy the names given to the various colours. There’s “Donny Grey”, which is a reference to the skies above Doncaster, where one of the bosses grew up. And there’s “Magic Mushroom”. No idea what colour that is, obviously. Many, probably.
It’s on the inside, though, where you get a real treat. Twenty-one switches and buttons, mounted in rows. On the roof. You’re going to see that and if you have anything at all in your underpants you’re going to sign on the dotted line. Especially when I tell you one of them can be used to turn the seatbelt bonger off.
Oh, and there are also two horns. One is for clearing villages and the other, operated via a small thumb switch on the wheel, is a “toot” for warning cyclists that you’re approaching. I couldn’t help noticing, however, that the “toot” was, if anything, slightly louder than the village clearance alternative. Music to my ears.
There are, however, a few issues. First of all, my colleagues in other motoring publications have been saying it’s a farmer’s car. It isn’t because of the pricing, which starts at an eye-watering £55,000.
Landowners and the shooting fraternity could afford that, of course, but they might object to the fidgety ride. And they’ll definitely mind the exhaust, which is routed to the right of the transmission tunnel. That means the pedals are offset to the right and too close together. So if you are wearing wellies it’s possible for your right foot to get stuck underneath the brake pedal. Which is not ideal if you want to, you know, stop.
Then there’s the steering, which has about 400 turns from lock to lock, and which stubbornly refuses to self-centre properly. Every morning I’d turn right at the bottom of my farm drive, and unless I was prepared to do a very vigorous workout on the wheel, I’d keep on turning right until I was going back up the drive again.
Other things. Well, to shut the door you have to slam it like a girl. If you attempt a gentle, manly approach it won’t close properly. And to make that doubly annoying, if it’s slightly ajar you can engage reverse, but as soon as you try moving off it’ll jump into neutral. It took me three days of blocking car park exits to figure that one out.
I’m afraid there’s more bad news. In the course of my week with the car I got a selection of orange and red warnings about power steering failure, engine failure and an issue with the hill descent control. As a result I’m forced to conclude there may be some quality-control holes on the production line. Originally the factory was going to be a new-build in Wales, but eventually Ratcliffe bought the site in Lorraine where Mercedes-Benz used to make Smart cars.
There’s even a little badge on the side of the Grenadier that combines the flags of Britain and Germany. And that’s odd as, the last time I looked, Lorraine was in France. Which explains the wonky warning lights.
Whatever. The absolute last thing you need if you’re planning on driving to Timbuktu is a car that can’t even get round Oxfordshire without having an electronic hissy fit. And it wasn’t just mine either because a neighbour and fellow motoring writer was having the exact same problems with his.
It’s sad. I really wanted it to be brilliant. I even sort of wanted one. But I have a feeling that building a new car from scratch has been a lot more complicated than Ratcliffe imagined. He had his ladder chassis and tractor axles all laid out in his mind but — and we know this from Tesla, which has woeful reliability issues — putting things together properly is hard.
Plus, when I see those cramped-up pedals and note that the back seats won’t fold flat because of the battery’s location, I sense that this is a car that could have done with a bit more time on the drawing board. I fear, however, that at some point Jim and his team thought, “We’ve spent enough time and money on this project now. And what we have will have to do.” Sadly, though, it won’t.
Jeremy tested a preproduction model, which Ineos Automotive acknowledges had several glitches, including the problem with the door, that have now been fixed
Today’s the sunday times magazine
