The Land Rover Defender is an anachronism. Evolved from a lineage that reaches back to 1948, and with an overall design largely unchanged since 1971, the upright British off-roader has gone from stalwart farm machinery to utilitarian icon. Hell, even Queen Elizabeth II drives one—with a manual transmission, naturally.
Unfortunately, this staunch defender of the body-on-frame 4×4 tradition isn’t long for this world. Land Rover will stop building the Defender at the end of this year, a 12-mpg victim of tightening efficiency and emissions standards. The Defender is old-school in every sense, including the way it turns dead dinosaur juice into forward momentum: inefficiently. In its place, Land Rover plans an entire family of thoroughly modern Defenders.
But while the current Defender has never been a poster child for efficiency, driving dynamics, luxurious appointment, or cutting-edge style, it’s an icon—perhaps precisely because of how charmingly it flouts all of those ideals.
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And that’s not just a put-on: The Defender’s rigid traditionalism reaches all the way back to the West Midlands factory where each example is made. No million-dollar ten-axis robots calibrated to balance a sewing needle on its pointy end here. Just craft-trained British men and women, hammering, welding, and bolting together stamped-aluminum body parts and brutish mechanical components by hand.
It’s not the fastest way, nor the most efficient. And that makes it perfect.
This story originally appeared on roadandtrack.com.
