On my last visit to South Africa my wife was driving our D110 back to Durban from the Drakensberg when the skies opened up and we got caught in a heavy rain storm. The temperature dropped sharply. The Defender's climate control wasn't doing much (perhaps it couldn't keep pace with the ingress of cold air) and my wife had a waterfall of rain runoff cascading over her feet. We laughed about it at the time because it was so ridiculous and a memorable part of the adventure, but we knew that in 3 weeks we'd be back in our Disco 1 in the States. It's one thing if the inconvenience is a novelty - that's charm. If I had to put up with that on a daily basis over the course of years, that would be different. But I'd still do it. Unfortunately the masochists who prefer the character that accompanies outdated engineering and inconsistent manufacturing quality are not a large enough market segment on which to hang an entire family of vehicles. Many people love the Defender because of its quirks and shortcomings, not in spite of them. They will continue to keep the dinosaurs running. That doesn't mean the brains at LR haven't figured out how to improve upon these things in the new Defender.
That's the thing. Generally, the people talking about that new model already have another vehicle to come home to, and the quirks of the Defender are simply part of the experience. They can drive one when out and about, or have one as a second car.
Who here would trade a brand new Power Wagon for an original, if you had to drive it
every day? People forget that a Defender is meant to be a daily driver.
It does pain me to say, but the new Wrangler, purely from a build and engineering
quality (not performance or durability) standpoint, is very close to what a Defender should have been around the time of the DII, in my opinion.
Right about now, I think a good place for it to be under the skirt would be sitting on a modified LR4 platform.
The new model does indeed meet the original intent of the vehicle, though. I don't think the PTO functions are relevant anymore. When was the last time a person capable of buying a
new Land Rover hooked that up to anything even remotely important? Hell, when's the last time anyone has? I don't think I've ever seen it done out of necessity.
I'm not saying I want the old guard to go away, or the Defender to be tamed, but there's a reality that Land Rover ignored for too long, and that's the other half of the reason we're here with this new model:
Being the best doesn't mean you're good enough. It can simply be an accident that isn't endlessly repeatable.
I like the Defender a lot, and it's too bad they can't just keep building the thing the old way, but this is better than nothing. Minus the modern annoyances (electronics, disconnect from controls, bumpers that can't be easily replaced, and so on) that I'm sure will have me bitching, the vehicle looks fine.
It just isn't a "Defender". It's likely to be a really nice SUV that can actually get dirty, though.
They threw good money after bad for far too long on that old platform, and that's on Land Rover. They let it rot to the point that an entirely new vehicle had to be manufactured from the ground up.
So, the old Defender is now where it belongs; as a second or third car in the developed world, and slowly becoming obsolete everywhere else. That was indeed the end of an era; the era just ended a little earlier than most of us would like to admit...
Cheers,
Kennith