LAND ROVER DEFENDER

Our new 130-all 5358mm and £96,745 of it - has its first taste of life as a daily wagon

- MATT PRIOR

FIRST REPORT

WHY WE'RE RUNNING IT

Can an extra-long, diesel 4x4 justify a place in daily motoring life in 2024?

No sooner had I written that the Ford Ranger Raptor had left Autocar's long-term fleet (to join Steve Cropley's personal fleet, and fair play to him), a similarly large vehicle has arrived to replace it.

It's a Land Rover Defender 130, the longest variant yet of JLR's most rugged 4x4, the car that represented the final peg of a "three-legged stool" when it was launched in 2020, alongside the Discovery and Range Rover. (And given there are multiples of Discovery and Range Rover, I still wonder if there's room for more than one Defender type.)

The 130 lives on the same 3022mm wheelbase as the Defender 110 but has had 340mm added behind the back axle, with a slight lower-body lift back there at the same time to reduce compromise to the car's departure angle.

The Defender was a pretty big car already, and now it's a really big one, at 5099mm long without a spare wheel and 5358mm long with it, as here.

Such is the space offered that it's the only Defender variant that can be optioned with a third row of seats, although in that form it can't also be specified with the jump seat in the front, because nine seats are too many for a passenger car.

The last time a Defender joined Autocar's long-term fleet, a very pleasant 90, I had the pleasure of working through the configurator and picking the choice options: steel wheels, blue paint, white roof, chunky tyres.