Ineos Grenadier Completes Off-Road Testing, but Production Schedule Slips
Britain’s aspiring Defender fighter will need more than excellent engineering and off-road chops to succeed.
Ineos Grenadier proceeds through several stages of real-world testing, completing mountain trials in Austria.
Ineos has purchased a Mercedes-Benz factory in France a few months ago to produce the SUV and pickup.
Production is now expected to start in July 2022 at the latest, due to delays prompted by the pandemic.
The Ineos Grenadier is working its way to production, itching to compete with the Land Rover Defender for sales and ruggedness, and it has just completed the latest phase of off-road testing on the trails of the Schöckl mountain in Austria, near Magna Steyr s headquarters. These mountain trails are known as one of the toughest 4x4 testing grounds in Europe and the world, so it was quite fitting that the Grenadier would get a serious workout in Magna Steyr s backyard.
The Ineos Grenadier tackles Austria s Schöckl mountain in dynamic testing
The development team for the Ineos Grenadier have taken the vehicle to some of the most punishing and formidable off-road testing grounds globally. In its final phase of dynamic testing, prototypes of the Grenadier were driven up the trails of the Schöckl mountain near the Austrian headquarters of Magna Steyr, which is Ineos’s engineering partner, as part of an engineering gate assessment. Magna Steyr has used the Austrian mountains to test ultimate off-road performance and durability for special-purpose vehicles for decades as the hard-rock terrain there is unforgiving and destructive.
Bosses behind the Ineos project cited unavoidable delays through 2020 as a result of the pandemic, stating that production would start in July next year at the latest .