I feel a little reticent posting a rambling meme regarding my new Defender while so many on this forum have no idea if or when their car will arrive. But, lucky me, as I picked up my Defender 110 HSE end of June. The car arrived a week short of 4 months from placing the order here in North Texas.

Here are the vehicle details:

1. 110 HSE 5 seats
2. Color Gondwana Stone
3. Cold Climate Pack—well you need that sort of thing in Texas right?
4. Towing Pack
5. 22” gloss black 5098 wheels—for all those off road adventures
6. Three-zone climate
7. Heated/cooled seats
8. Black contrast roof
9. Panoramic Sunroof
10. HUD
11. Activity key—not sure why I put this on the list. Still, it’s on back order or something.
12. 11.4” screen—which seems small already
13. ClearSight mirror

There may be a few other options I’ve forgotten about.

BUYING EXPERIENCE

Overall, the buying experience was okay I guess, but I would choose a root canal over buying a car any day. The 2020 configurator was not online initially when I decided to buy a Defender. Fortunately my dealer was able to spec the car I wanted based on the 2021 build I sent him. The only option I was unable to get was the center console refrigerator—something I had in my RRS SC and also wanted in the Defender. I put down a $2K deposit and then went about my business for the next several months. Sales guy kept me informed every few weeks with updates on the build and delivery schedule, which was appreciated. Still, I bought a new motorcycle in LA many years ago. Everything done online and all I had to do was get a taxi to the motorcycle dealership, sign a couple of things and ride away. I would like to do that again some day with a car purchase that doesn’t involve buying a Tesla

NO EXPORT AGREEMENT

The Defender arrived in late June. On handover day, I was at the dealership signing the usual documents when I was hit with the “Agreement Not to Export” papers. Others on this forum have reported a similar agreement at handover time, so it wasn’t really much of a surprise. Still, I think sales guy wanted to rush me with this one as he rambled on about the reasons behind it while I was trying to look for the devil the details. I politely ignored him and continued on with reading. There were certainly a few things I was not happy about and so I asked him to email the doc to my wife (and CC me) to look it over. As my wife is a lawyer, it made sense to fully understand what I was/was not about to sign.

While I waited in the sales guy’s office for wifey’s feedback, I decided to install the Remote app. The setup and account registration was painless and the app connected with “my” Defender almost immediately—this is before I’d even set eyes on the car, which was kind of weird. The app showed the fuel tank was at a couple of miles until empty, and it had 8 miles or something on the clock. Huh, I’m buying a brand new car with an empty tank? I thought about starting the engine with the app but decided that wasn’t a good idea from where I was sat. All the while I was wondering if I would be walking away from the deal should my wife tell me not to sign. At some point during this period, the fuel tank reading in the app went from near empty to 370 something miles ‘til empty and the odometer also changed—I assume that either the app had only just received the latest telemetry or someone had just filled the tank in readiness for yours truly.

Anyway, after reviewing No Export doc, my wife decided to drive out to the dealership with said paperwork in-hand. Have you ever known a lawyer to do that kind of thing? She’d crossed out many of the paragraphs in the agreement—I recollect 4 thru 8 were definitely a no-no for her and 9 was heavily edited. The only thing left was basically the agreement not to export and give said dealer first opportunity to put an offer our way should we want to sell. We did not agree to dealership’s name on title document or accept any costs associated with any disputes and we also made clear that we had no obligation to accept whatever offer the dealer might give us to buy back. I initialed all of the changes and signed the doc and the sales guy took it to discuss with his (I presume) management. A few minutes later he came back to say they were happy with the changes and all was good. Wifey went back to work and I continued with the purchase process. No need for me to walk out—which I was certainly prepared to do. Still, it would not have been fun leaving with out my new Defender!

As a side note, I think most of what we crossed out were probably dealer added items. I would imagine there is a boiler plate agreement floating around US dealerships that they all use—presumably written by done low grade lawyer at best. JLR corporate just want to discourage rogue dealers and exporters. They force the onus on the dealer to do their due diligence. If they don’t and JLR find out, they cut the dealer’s allotment. I have no issue with that—we have similar restrictions in my industry. Of course, I’m not sure what would have happened had I refused to sign it. In the current market, the dealership would probably be able to sell the vehicle to someone else in a nanosecond. But I was also a returning customer. Had that happened I would not do business with them ever again. C’est la vie…

DELIVERY ROOM

That over with, it was time to go see my Defender. This is the time when you seem obliged to listen to your sales guy as you are tediously dragged through the operation of every feature in the car that you already know about. Still, twenty minutes later I was heading home, waving goodbye to my old RRS in the parking lot. Originally I wanted to keep the Sport—love that car. Unfortunately the boss said there’s no room at the Inn—it’s either the Range Rover or the Speed Triple. Geeez… and so we traded my old car.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Obviously I had already driven the Defender some 4 months prior so there were no real surprises. My impressions here are based primarily on the differences coming from a 2011 body-on-frame, supercharged Range Rover Sport. So, not really objective and not totally unfamiliar either. When I first sat in a Defender, I thought the interior was quite funky, with not a hint of the original about it—thankfully. I think it’s actually really well laid out—plenty of storage and well put together. Materials are very much different to the Range Rover line-up. Although I like wood trim in cars, I decided to forgo the wood for the standard Robustec trim. To me, wood doesn’t work in this car.

The larger 11.4” screen was well worth the $140 upgrade cost. There is so much more real estate, not just for navigation but also the other menus are just better laid out. Pivi Pro is also much more responsive than the older InControl Touch Pro we have in our Velar. I think the timing of the vehicle purchase was just right given the recent production issues and all the noise on this forum regarding delays. I’m bloody lucky I guess.

The general driving experience is very good. Nice, consistent feel and weight to all the controls. The ride, even with 22” wheels is much better than my old RRS. Yes, I hear you off-road hooligans shaking your heads at my choice of wheels… but to me, off roading is like parachuting, only advisable in dire emergencies. I did make the mistake of going off road once. Luckily my lawn didn’t sustain too much damage.

Overall, the ride and handling characteristics are way better than my old RRS. I’m sure the newer unibody RRS is way better too, but I have never driven one to find out. Where the RRS chassis would shimmy over potholes, there’s no flex at in the Defender. Also, no squeaks or rattly trim panels. The only slight annoyance is noise from what I think is the retractably roof blind occasionally when riding deep potholes.

Performance wise, I find the new i6 engine does not have the initial pickup of my old car. Sure, it loses about 100+ horses over the 5.0 SC, but there’s less weight to move around. Floor the throttle and there’s still a slight lag while the electric supercharger spools up. The Sport would give you an instant shove in the back. Although smooth, it’s not quite turbine like smooth as say a BMW inline six, but smoother that most. Incidentally, I did test drive an X5 M and an iDrive40i pre-COVID. But, as with all recent Beemers, I just cannot live with their pig-ugly styling. Brilliant and bloody fast cars that only their mother and blind petrolheads would love. But I digress.

The HUD in the Defender has very crisp graphics and is quite legible—I did have to adjust projected display to it’s lowest setting though. I configured it to show speed, speed limit and navigation directions. BTW, my glasses are polarized, yet I have no issues reading the HUD. This was also the case with the F-Pace we had a couple of years ago. The ClearSight camera also needed adjusting. Initially, all I could see was the rooftop of the car close behind. Fortunately, you can change the viewing angle using the mirror controls to point the camera further up or down. The downside with ClearSight is focussing on an image on the screen rather than the infinite focal length of a mirror. And with the variable focus glasses, I have to tip my head up a little. From the outside it must look like I’m checking for boogers. Still, I only ever expect it to be used when the car is fully loaded.

When driving through stop/start traffic on my way home from the dealer, I noticed a really annoying behavior. After braking and coming to a standstill, if I then lifted my foot off the brake pedal to continue moving forward, nothing happened. The car did not creep forward as I expected—not until I tapping the gas pedal. Wtf? This happened several times. A quick scan of the instrument cluster, I noticed the word “Hold” in orange, which kind of gave me a clue. As I was driving, there wasn’t much I could do about it, so I put up with the behavior until I got home. Strange that this would be set to ON by default. This was probably the one feature sales guy forgot to mention! I have to wonder if someone was playing around with the settings beforehand. It should definitely not be enabled by default. At home I found the Hold function setting in the “Quick” page of the settings menu. Annoyance gone. I honestly do not know why this would be useful other than off-road may be!

On the steering wheel there is a programable button (short press/long press). I programmed them to Mute and Guidance Off respectively—could not think of anything else. I wish there were more features/controls to choose from. For example, I want the camera view to be displayed at the touch of this button. I can’t think why that was not one of the first things JLR would have considered—even if it only worked at slow speeds. One can only hope this will be added in a future s/w update. Right?…

I had to laugh the other day while driving with my wife in the car. She was telling me how she liked the Gondwana Stone color, but literally as she said that we passed a Tasman Blue Defender with steel wheels and a white top. She said, “omg why the heck didn’t you pick that color scheme?” I told her she didn’t know what she was talking about and that she needs to stick to lawyering. Bloody hell!

I have had the car about 6 weeks now and overall, I am very pleased with it. Nothing gone wrong. Engine bedding in nicely. To wrap up, here are some of my likes/dislikes:

Likes

• I think the car looks pretty good in Gondwana stone with the blacked-out top half. Note though, the color is much darker and richer than the online photos. Better looking than I originally thought when I ordered it. I honestly didn’t care too much about the color so long as it wasn’t all black or all white or that stupid Tasman blue! 😄
• Seats very comfortable, esp. with the side bolster adjustment. Well worth getting the 14-way heated/cooled seats. Softly cushioned headrests nice too.
• Infotainment system, Pivi Pro is actually very good once you run though the menus a couple of times. Responsive and easy to navigate. Fewer menu levels than the older JLR systems.
• Apple CarPlay seems very reliable and as good as any other car I have driven that has it—BMW notwithstanding.
• P400 i6 is very smooth and free revving. Not quite 5.0 SC V8 but way better than the old 3.0 V6 lump. I like it more each time I drive the car.
• Road handling very good for a large SUV. It is in no way as good as a Cayenne, X5, but that is not the pointing of this car. It’s def better looking than those two though.
• Very commanding driving position—as with most Land Rovers. Great view out the front and sides and in town you’re not looking up at idiot pickup trucks. Well, not all of them.
• Well suppressed road, engine noise.
• Form fitting rubber mats great and fit well. Also rubberized flooring is better than I expected. I have stored the carpeted mats in a closet as I probably will not use them. Strange having a car with no carpets. I think the last car I ever rode in with no carpets was my aunt’s 1960s Ford Anglia!
• ClearSight works great, but I will probably very rarely use it. It’s always there if I need it.
• Underfloor space at the back is useful to hide shjt. No spare wheel to take up the space.
• Strange cargo cover design—at least that was my first impression. Since then, I’ve come to realize how practical it actually is compared with the usual roll-up kind or the solid folding type. Whenever we would load bulky items in the RRS or any of our other SUVs we’ve had, the cargo cover was one of these things that had no place to go when the car was full of gear. With the Defender you can just fold it up and stuff it anywhere. No need for it to collect dust in the garage.

Dislikes

• Apple CarPlay does not support wireless connectivity or multi-screen mirroring. It has wireless charging so wireless CarPlay should be there too. I know BMW supports these two features and I hope we get this with a software update one day.
• Wind noise around the A pillars is more than I would expect—I’m sure not helped by upright windshield.
• Jury out on the windshield wipers. Skipped a lot during first drive in heavy rain. This may be due to the rubber still being new.
• Passenger side door mirror looks too narrow.
• The rear center seat headrest clashes with the latch under the seat cushion when extending the rear luggage area. This looks like a design fault/oversight. The rear headrests can flip forward allowing room for the seat backs to slot behind the flipped seat cushions. However, the center seat headrest will hit the steel hook that is exposed when the cushioned are flipped forward. At a push the center seat back will fold down fully, but I expect it will wear the headrest material over time. The only way to avoid this is to remove the center headrest completely whenever you want to extend the rear luggage area. This kind of makes the headrest flip-forward option pointless.
• The access height of the Defender is several inches higher than access height mode of my old RRS. I would say Defender access height it is about the same as normal height mode in the RRS. Egress is a little challenging right now, so I guess I need some practice before parking in public areas.
• Un-chilled center console storage bin. I want my refrigerator damn it! Obviously not a real fault of the Defender.
• 3D Camera views—for some camera views, it would be nice if the view could be expanded to the full extents of the display. Make full use of the larger screen as you get with navigation.
• Spare wheel placement really does screw with rear visibility. Almost totally reliant on the various camera views to reverse. Not that I think it’s a bad design—it’s just the way it is.
• Keyless entry of drivers door is hit and miss. I find that it works if key is in my right-side pocket but only half the time if in left-side pocket. That would imply the sensor above the drivers door may not be functioning correctly. Never had this problem in my RRS
• Gear selector button to change from reverse to drive and vice versa is a bit hit and miss. Because you can freely move the lever back and forwards, regardless if the button is pressed, it’s possible that you may think you have changed from say reverse to drive, so you hit the accelerator and instead of moving forward you actually move back. This has happened to me several times and I’m sure one day I will end up reversing into a f’n wall. I really do not like it. It’s a drawback of fly-by-wire great selection. Bring back mechanical linkage please. Even the dial selector version in the velar is better than this.

There are a lot of dislikes here but, other than the last item, I added the other dislikes just for column fodder. In other words I’m really very happy with the car. Absolutely no regrets. And Gondwana stone really is better than Tasman blue!!

 

Don’t mean to sound patronizing, but it reads like you don’t realize refrigerated console is an option on Defender? If you do realize it, seems strange to list as a fault something you just didn’t order. Or if you don’t realize it, now you do. I enjoyed two ice-cold cans of club soda on my 2.5-hour drive today! It’s a great option to have.

TOTALLY agree about the ease with which the gear selector can be inadvertently left in R or D when the other is meant to be engaged. It is insanely, stupidly, criminally negligent in the full legal meaning of the word to allow that oversight. Cars have been locking out shift lever movement without a button push for a decades, probably more than half a century. Allowing you to move the lever to the place that means D or R, without actually going to D or R is just horribly dangerous, for the exact reason you state.

 

The refrigerator was on the build I sent to my sales guy. When he ran it through the 2022 configurator (this was before it was online to the general public) he said he could not add it for some unknown reason. We agreed to try again a few weeks later. I completely forgot about it until he told me the car was on a ship heading to the US. 😡

The center cubbyhole isn’t much use to me, so I think I will have to get the part number and try to order the fridge unit. I have the service manual and it looks like a simple swap. I may look on eBay for late model Range Rover refrigerator as I believe they are the same.

In the mean time, enjoy your ice-cold club sodas while I drink hot bottles of water. I guess I could add a tea bag?…🤔

 

That should work well with the OEM port installed tea-set (standard on the V8 Carpathian)


After market cucumber sandwich not pictured.

 

Great write-up @TheMoke . I'll try to throw something out after a trip in a couple weeks. Still don't have a lot of miles in it! I think all the things are negative to me are wrapped up on what got dropped when they converted it to a MY22. And I definitely agree with the shifter that everyone is piling in on. I haven't had a Land Rover in about 30 years, so my reference points are REALLY dated - but the gear shift seems backwards to me. Forward is backwards and backwards is forwards took me a while to get used to!

 

I saw that long post and thought, "who tf is reading all of this?!"

Okay, when I was done reading it, I laughed because the sales manager at my local dealership asked me to back the Defender out when I did the test drive... because he was afraid... and I found out later that it was because he had hit a lamp post because he thought he was in reverse.

Great write-up @TheMoke

 

Yeah sorry about that. If I had opened this post to read it, I would have very quickly moved on to the next unread post. It is bloody long! It must have been all the tea I drank yesterday.

 

Yeah, but I gotta give it to you. It was worth the read so thanks for taking the time.

 

Interesting that you mention it's easily swappable ... I have the non-fridge unit, the online service manual or the iguide has no mention of how one could swap it. Where did you find it ?

 

​​​​​​I programmed mine to mute / unmute the sound system (short press) or enable / disable Stealth Mode (long press), which I find very convenient when driving long stretches of dark roads at night - since all the interior buttons / dash / monitor / ambient lighting can be a bit too much when you are just concentrating on the road ahead of you, or you have passengers that are trying to sleep. If you have the HUD, that display will dim as well to a more acceptable level (for night driving.)

Enabling Stealth Mode with the Favorite steering wheel button is not super intuitive, so I took a short video.

​​​​
​​​Speaking of HUD, it's interesting that you don't seem to be affected by polarized sunglasses during the day. My HUD nearly "disappears" if I wear my polarized Maui Jim sunglasses. I need to tilt my head about 45 degrees, like a confused dog, to clearly see it again.