Thread: 2007 Defender

Originally Posted by boggo

No offence fellas,but a defender owner(and therefore lover)does and would not give a rats what the thing looks like,or how slick the new interior is.Personally,I love the setup inside,I can see all the info I need,store way more than I really need,and best of all,no rattles,no matter what the surface!!The most important info on the new model,I think,is technical.Will the new motor have any special off road tweaks?Will they beef up the dirvetrain?Defenders are a pure 4wd,not built for speed or comfort,but hard out 4wdving.
P.S:Where is Harold Scruby??Obviously not out educating the public on pedestrian safety!!How do we vote for a new president?'maybe we could stack the council...........................

That's the trick.. the "council" consists of Scruby... there aren't any other members so you can't join or vote him off. It is his invention to make himelf seem more important

Ah ha.Maybe we should start the Oz offroad(or 4wd safety) council,and use the publicity we could get to stop the bastards(NPWS and state govt)stealing our land,blocking our favourite trails,thus forcing more and more people into less and less area and then using increased use as an excuse to lock even more places up!!!!!!!!@#$%^^^^^^^^^&&&&&&*******)????!!!!!
Sorry,I can get a bit carried away on that subject

Originally Posted by Graz

I hope Landrover listen to the poeple and make the driver and front pax area bigger.
If they do I'll retire the old dog Disco and buy one.
When I drive the Defenders in the fire brigade my knees hit the dash and I have to hang my right shoulder and elbow out the drivers side window to fit. My Series one had more room.

You are right - the S3 had more room, as the doors are a lot thinner. The problem faced by the Defender is that the passenger space dimensions were set by the S2 in 1958, or probably by the S1 86 in 1953, and not only has the space been reduced by thicker doors, but people in general have got a lot bigger in the last fifty years, and standards of comfort have got higher. To make any significant improvement would mean widening the whole body, and probably increasing the length of the passenger space as well. This could be done without any change to the basic chassis, as the wheels are just about outside the body anyway, but to do so would be to throw away one of the Defender's major advantages over the opposition - most body parts are either the same since 1983 or at least interchangeable, in some cases going back to 1958 (S2 doors fit the current Defender for example).
While this change is needed, the necessary tooling changes mean that it would cost no more to do a complete redesign, and my guess is it will not happen until the Defender is redesigned to use a common platform with the Discovery 3 (or perhaps its successor), and once this happens there will be no need for the result to resemble the current Defender in anything except name. While it is possible that the result may be a worthy successor, I am afraid that there is no reason to expect this.
The Defender is the lineal descendant of the original Landrover, and the features that provide its attraction were to a large extent accidents of its history. The basic design was, because it was intended as a stopgap, deliberately made to use a minimum of tooling. This made the resulting product inherently easy to maintain or modify, but the penalty was high assembly costs - it is bolted together, not assembled by industrial robots using welding, and no sane manufacturer would design a car like that in the present day. The only chance for a similar design to continue would be if it were built in a country with cheap labour, and this may happen, although I would be surprised.
John