LAND ROVER DEFENDER OCTA

It's a 4x4 that thinks it's a supercar. But does this 627bhp V8 flagship offer the best of both worlds or just compromise each for the other?

- MATT SAUNDERS

On a rutted, unsealed gravel road about 200 miles north of Cape Town, South Africa, a very special new Land Rover is doing its thing. It's been doing it all day, to be honest - over rock, sand, mud and on asphalt. But right now it's hitting a truly spectacular and unbelievably composed stride.

There is very little besides us on this dead-straight, bumpy stretch that beams out towards a horizon wonderfully broad and invitingly mountain-spiked.

Local speed limits on minor roads like these are "surprisingly high", say our guides and, led by them, our convoy soon finds itself approaching UK motorway speeds on surfaces on which you simply wouldn't contemplate going nearly so quickly unless utterly confident that you were driving a very rare and particular kind of performance car.

Here and now, we're probably carrying 40-50% more speed than you would dare in most modern fast SUVS - Porsche Cayennes, Lamborghini Uruses and MercedesAMG G-Wagens included - for fear of being bounced off course, blowing a tyre or simply losing control and careering heaven knows where. But this Land Rover is very evidently made of different stuff and its chassis is simply cutting through the dust, clawing at terra firma underneath and sucking up what punishment it finds, staying incredibly level and composed all the while.

And so, alongside names and reputations like the Ariel Nomad and Ford Ranger Raptor, we must now rank the Defender Octa: a fast 4x4 that, it seems, can do absolutely everything and go everywhere that a regular Defender 110 can, albeit an awful lot more quickly.