In April this year Land Rover announced that its sub-brands Defender, Discovery and Range Rover would become brands in their own right.
Not only will this make the model names less clunky - Land Rover Range Rover Velar is quite a mouthful after all - but it will also allow the three nameplates to expand while doing what they do best.
Range Rover and Discovery are already model families in their own right, but soon we could see the Defender range multiplying to include a smaller model.
JLR boss Adrian Mardell has already confirmed during an investor conference recently that the upcoming EMA electric vehicle platform, which will underpin the Range Rover Evoque and Discovery Sport replacements, will also spawn a Defender variant.
And now Autocar has shed some light on this model, revealing that it could hit showrooms by around 2027, wearing Defender Sport branding.
It’s set to be similar in size to the next Evoque, with a likely length of around 4.6 metres, Autocar reports, and it will also be battery powered.
But JLR will have to pull out the stops to ensure that its baby Defender is competent off-road, as sharing an architecture with the Evoque could lead people to label it as soft.
While the details are still very much under wraps, the company’s marketing director Anthony Bradbury told Autocar that the Defender brand will continue to embrace the “explorer” spirit that’s existed ever since the original.
“It’s an explorer’s vehicle, it’s always pushed boundaries, it’s always physically allowed you to do things no other vehicle can. It’s about that spirit of embracing the impossible, and it has been like that for 75 years,” Bradbury told the British publication, before adding that future Defender vehicles must embody that “feeling of activation, of doing”.
JLR announced earlier this year that its upcoming EMA platform for midsize SUVs would be an electric only architecture, but that the modular longitudinal platform that underpins the Range Rover and Defender, would continue to accommodate internal combustion engines.
A fully electric Range Rover product is also on the cards for as early as 2025, and it’s likely that we’ll see it in concept form soon as the order books for this model are set to open later in 2023.