DAIMOND IN THE ROUGH

The Octa is the biggest, baddest version of the Defender yet-conquering the South African wilderness should be a walk in the park...

- JASON BARLOW

It sounds sacrilegious, but some of us reckon the Sterrato might be the best Lamborghini ever. Super slidy, looks great, can take lots of punishment. Likewise the Porsche 911 Dakar. Sure, the limit is much lower than in racier 911s, but life's easier when you get there. It's an interesting direction of travel.

The Land Rover Defender Octa is on a similar trajectory but arrives from the opposite end of the spectrum. The mission statement here is to create the world's fastest off roader. Trying to define that is like nailing jelly to a wall, and a Nürburgring lap time isn't going to tell the whole story. It's about bandwidth, creating something that can do preposterous things off road while also behaving in normal conditions.

So Octa is the answer to a disparate bunch of formerly rather niche questions. A dune bashing, quasi Dakar rally raider disguised as a long distance family hauler. A rock crawler that can also drift with mindless abandon. Celebratory, too. With the Land Rover name now parked in the basement as the company bigs up individual model brands, Defender has been an enormo-hit since it arrived in 2019. Its much loved but antiquated predecessor was shifting 12,000 units per year at the end, the current model is doing those numbers every month. The business case initially assumed 55,000 annual global sales, so double that plus all those highly specced Range Rovers equals heady profit.

Now here's the flagship. The Octa has been three years in the making, is extensively reengineered (13,960 additional tests were carried out), and lands costing £161k. Sheesh. Is it worth it? We're in South Africa to find out, and the full gamut of challenges await. So much so that it's quite possible we could kill this new car.