I've been considering driving the new defender I've purchased on the beach and have been looking into a viable rust protection strategy. Has anyone else looked into this or gone with a solution for this?

Thanks!

 

It's aluminum

 

A beach is probably the worst place to take any car on a regular basis, whether it's made of steel, aluminum or unobtainium . You may want to look at an old car for that kind of thing.

Otherwise, get your car ceramic coated and may be vinyl wrapped and put the car through a drive-thru wash/wax (incl underside) after each beach run. When you get home, have a dehumidifier in your garage and a fan blowing under the car. you will want to remove all sea salt and sand from anywhere it will collect--which is everywhere of course. The worst places are the places you do no see. You could also look at the boating industry and see what products they sell to protect against salt-related corrosion.

 

My mechanic recommended lanolin wax, and specifically said they had been using Fluid Film on the undersides of Rovers for years. He recommended I use it on the underside of the P300. Looks like you can't it at almost any auto parts place, but I found decent options on Amazon.

 

We had two 2013 LR4's...one with 131,000 miles now that we took everywhere, including frequent trips to the beach in summer and weekly trips to VT in winter on heavily salted roads. The other LR4 was our garage queen with 35K miles. Both have light surface rust on their steel frames but not a drastic difference in underbody corrosion. Neither has any rust on any body panels. The Defender is mostly aluminum underbody, so unless you plan to keep it 20 years, just take it to the beach as-is and enjoy it.

 

Road salt is a million times worse than the beach. My LR3 has been on the beach a bunch of times every year for the last 15 years and it has very little surface rust on its frame.