Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.
For the purposes of this review it is necessary for me to declare that I like old things. I live in an old house that doesn’t work but has beautiful floors, so it makes me happy. I like cricket. I like oak trees and deep stoeps. I think Verdi was a badass and am so unreconstructed that I am brave to say, in a public forum, that I still love Shakespeare.
This is why I approached the new Land Rover Defender with some anxiety. This car comes with a full payload of baggage, expectations and the projections of fans around the world – or perhaps just my own. We will never know, but after BMW aced the new Mini 20 years ago, replacing the Defender was the single most impossible task in the automotive world. Take an archaic global icon, and replace it with a modern car carrying the same name. I’m not sure you’d wish it on your worst automotive enemy. As somebody close to the manufacturer pointed out to me, if the Defender had gone through a standard five-to-seven-year product cycle, the new Defender is the car we would have got, and we wouldn’t have batted an eyelid.