Hello!

I was at my dealer again recently and the Sales Manager was saying I should be able to take my new defender and do a Land Rover experience for free? I then went to book online and everything I see you have to pay for. When calling the customer service team they were unaware of how to book it for free for customers.

So since people here are usually more knowledgable about this stuff then LR themselves I figured I would see if other people have done the experience for free included with their purchase and if so how you sign up? Also which experience are people liking the most?

Thanks,

Ian

 

I'm quite local to the one here in California, and they emailed me directly not long after I bought mine about the free owner experience. The free one is a couple of hours, there are longer owner experiences which are paid and you can upgrade to those if I remember right. I also did the free owner event when I bought my Range Rover a few years back. I haven't had to deal with the Land Rover customer service team, but I did once have to call the Jaguar customer service team, and they were simply appalling. Absolutely worthless.

 

I took delivery of my 110 6/28/21 and got my email about the Experience on September 28. Don't know if the "exactly 3-months" thing was coincidence or if the email is auto-generated on that date.

As swajames indicated, the free portion is for the 2-hour course. You can apply the value of that to the all-day course, which is what I did (9am to 5pm, with an hour off for lunch at one of the Biltmore bistros.) It was superb. I have a lot of technical offroading experience in Cherokees and Wranglers, but the new Defender is so different in how it goes about things that I was glad for the course and learned a tremendous amount from it. You can use your own truck or reserve one of theirs. Asheville only has one Defender, a 110 P300 with all the off-road packs, or at least that was the case last November when I did the course. They have several discos and a RR or two also.

 

OK awesome the experience center just called me and they were very helpful. They confirmed that I can do the 2 hour experience for free at any center in the U.S.

@NoGaBiker they did mention that the Baltimore in Asheville was one of the biggest experiences and recommended it. I have never been there so I am thinking about trying that one out.

 

5000 acres, almost 100 miles of off-road trails. The Orvis Sporting Clays school is also on the property, as well as the Orvis Fly Fishing school. And the 5000 acres is not the whole Biltmore property -- only the portion reserved for the Activity Center (I think that's the name.)

 

I did two full days at the Biltmore one a few years ago and had a fantastic time.

I highly recommend doing more than one day. You get to drive different vehicles, you go to a lot of parts of the property that a lot of people don't go to on shorter courses, develop a lot of off road skills, and have a blast. They'll tailor your experience to your driving skills and you can request to work on specific things like winching and recovery. It's not the cheapest thing to do but you get a LOT more seat time and one on one instruction compared to other driving schools. You'll get a great appreciation of what these vehicles are actually capable of, how to best use the available technology, and a great introduction to off roading.

 

One other thing I'll mention for anyone who's done an LRE and maybe wants next-level instruction:

The man who helped set up the Biltmore course and has helped orchestrate most of the media launches for recent LR products is Ben Wootten. When covid hit and LRE shut down he went out on his own. He now makes "guest appearances" as an instructor at Asheville when needed, but is available at his two off-road training sites in east Tennessee and Virginia. No affiliation other than to say I wholeheartedly endorse his abilities, and he's a helluva nice guy. Asks lots of questions, follows through, lets you proceed at the pace you want, and knows a whole lot about the Defender's systems. In fact, I was asking about the various different modes and what settings they employ for traction control, etc. in case I wanted to duplicate, say Mud & Ruts but wanted to dial up throttle response a notch or two. The day after our class he sent me this, which I hadn't been able to find anywhere:




Anyway, if anyone's interested: Classic 4x4

 

I'll second the Biltmore experience. We upgraded to the half-day (4 hour) and just paid the difference. I'd recommend doing at least that much, it goes by pretty quickly! You can request to use their Defender when you book just to get a sense of what our Defenders are capable of. Instructors were wonderful and the grounds are pretty. Took my wife, who didn't have much interest in off-roading, and she loved it.

 

inater - I just took delivery of my D110 and will be hitting up the owners day on March 27th with a buddy of mine who is bringing his LR4. Here are the details: https://experience.landroverusa.com/...ners-days.html

 

ugh wish we had land rover experience in/close to texas. maybe I can sneak into the bronco offroadeo outside of austin, tx with the defender