2002. I know its not really comparing apples with apple, but its still frustrating in my own head that I used to be able to buy a house for the sort of money that a car is now costing.
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Will they crack it?
Some of the biggest sellers over there are 4x4 'tough trucks' like the Ram, Chevy, Toyota, and Ford F series pickups - aka utes. If the US was the be all and end all, LR would have made the defender a tough truck Ute. At least in one of its variants!
And if not a tough truck, look at the SUV competition. The Toyota RAV 4 is the best selling SUV followed by the Jeep Cherokee, Toyota Highlander and Jeep wrangler. All of which are a lot cheaper than the new defender!
For comparison The 2019*Jeep Cherokee*has a starting*price*of $25,490 USD , making it one of the more expensive vehicles in the class. You can add four-wheel drive to the base trim for $1,500. A fully loaded*Cherokee*Trailhawk Elite*costs*about $42,000 USD.
The Pretender will start at 50k USD! And heads well north of 80k for all the bells and whistles
So clearly they are not going for a US best seller! Lower volume at premium prices is their choice.
The Jeep wrangler has Defender like heritage. The 2020 model still looks like a wrangler and serves like a wrangler. It has short, long wheelbase variants AND a UTE variant. A new Defender could have been competing with the wrangler in the US - The pretender will not. The Wrangler family all come in under 50k USD!
Land rover already have many expensive SUV models that sell well worldwide. They have a new factory in Slovakia to turn out higher volumes at less cost. So you would think they could afford to build a cheaper range of Defenders, keeping its utilitarian variants in tact, and be brave enough to target higher volume sales.
Mores the pity they can't make a 'bare bones' unit without all that guff and bring the price down $20K. Think they'd sell a shed load more if they did, but it sort of proves what others have said - LR isn't interested in that market, but pushes all the luxo BS onto only those that can afford the very top end - which is not what made LR great in the first place.
True - but even if they only get into the top 30 SUV’s they would be making record sales for any LR.
Editing my post - even if they crack the Top 50 SUVs sold in the US they would have record sales - this is how big the US market is. Plenty of expensive SUVs out sell LR products.
This is the real competition....
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/201...82ff6c6ac5.jpg
The Ford Expedition starts at US$53K for RWD only and outsells anything from LR by a factor of 3-4.
And when it is released, the 130 will be competing with the Chevrolet Surburban which costs even more and is even less capable off road. Also outsells everything from LR.
Large SUVs
On-road the New Defender will match all of these for comfort and features, and off-road it will leave them all behind - and if comparing base spec to base spec - then the new Defender out specs them all. To take any of these large SUV’s off road you have to option them up.
The new defender doesn't really have any direct competition as it's in its own category(thats why its so hard to think of competitors), I would say based on what I've seen they will sell a ton more of these defenders in Australia than they ever did before, they will also win discerning buyers from other manufacturers. If AU was irrelevent, the new defender would not be here, maybe less critical would be more factual. D5, is a very different animal, both externally and internally, with a different target buyer.
Im loving how tough the interior is!https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/201...0ade62ec4a.jpghttps://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/201...9603e00704.jpg
That looks like a secondhand 20k interior! not $80k+