Land Rover Defender Octa review

But if you spec your car with those tyres from new and find yourself, for example, in Germany, you’ll discover its top speed is not 155mph, but a mere 100mph – a Goodyear imposed load limit for the tyre. You cannot turn it off, though your dealer might. Specify standard all-terrain tyres and buy a set of the knobblies on the side, and the car will go full pelt whichever rubber it’s wearing. Perhaps it would be better if the car knew what tyres it was on and regulated itself accordingly – Pirelli can do it with its ‘Cyber Tyre’ which talks to the car upon which it is fitted, so why not here?

Additional to this is a unique function called ‘Octa’ mode, which does many clever things, such as increase the roll rate to maximise off-road traction, while firming up the damping to maintain body control. It shuttles 80 per cent of the torque to the rear axle, has a special off-road launch control function and a specific ABS programme to allow a degree of wheel lock because allowing mud, snow or gravel to pile up in front of the tyre can help make the car stop quicker. It even knows when the car is airborne and pre-loads the dampers ready for landing. Turn the traction control off and this is the closest Land Rover has come to installing a yob mode into one of its products. And, believe me, it’s all the better for it.

You can use Octa mode for two hours fast gravel but you don’t need to. I just selected the usual grass, gravel and snow setting, turned off the traction control and let the Defender do its thing.

When you start going this fast on the loose, you’re just waiting for it to all go horribly wrong. It’s like strapping an aqualung to your shoulders for the first time and heading down. Anyone who’s done it who tells you they never once had to silence that nagging voice in their head saying ‘you shouldn’t be doing this; you need to stop doing this now or bad things will happen’ is being economical with the actualité. Same here. I’m clinging to the wheel, trying to stay shy of the wall of dust thrown up by David’s Octa ahead even though, and I measured it, he was sometimes half a mile ahead.

But you can’t white knuckle it for two hours, so you’re almost forced to relax, to go with it and trust in your Octa and David’s judgement that, contrary to your every instinct, this is somehow going to work out. An hour later I’m skittering along on the same loose surface, but now chatting away to my passenger despite cruising at a speed that would earn a very healthy number of points on your licence if caught doing it on the M4. One day and another double digit number of hours at the wheel, barely any of them on what you or I might recognise as a road, and you don’t even think twice. Two hours fast gravel? By the time we were done it felt more like two days.

There was another reason I felt less than simpatico with the Octa at first. Initially that startlingly quick rack and those tall-walled, heavily treaded Goodyears felt like strange bedfellows, and I think that if Land Rover goofed at all on what was an otherwise spectacularly well planned adventure, it was not to provide any experience at all of the Octa on a standard tyre, even on the motorway out of Cape Town. The stiff-walled option rubber introduces a level of fidget into the ride I’ve felt in no other Defender, while the steering feels clearly set up for a tyre putting more rubber on the road and less between it and the wheel rim.

But you adapt, and on the loose the new tyres provide both exceptional grip and delicious breakaway characteristics. Being long of both weight and wheelbase, the Octa is not a fan of low-speed corners on road or off – not that you’ll find many of those in the Cederberg Wilderness Area – but once you’ve learned the technique, fabulous amounts of fun can be had here.

You need a medium to quick curve, back it in off the power, allow the weight transference to start the yaw, then be gentle with both reduction of lock and application of power; if you’re in any way sudden the car will think you’re experiencing an unintended event, shuttle all the torque forward to save you from yourself and shut down that particular avenue of entertainment in an instant. But if you’re a bit more elegant, you can power out of fast curves on the loose, car pointing slightly one way, wheels slightly the other, all thoughts of facial nonchalance a distant memory. If you possess human DNA and one drop of the good stuff in your veins, you’ll be grinning like a loon.

At other times you will not. Like when you’re faced with a rock wall so steep if you’d not just seen David scale it in an identical car you’d have bet every tooth in your head it would simply not be possible. Then you’re more likely to be staring in slack-jawed awe, trying to stop your heart punching your epiglottis. There was a time later in the same rock crawl when I actually braced for impact, so sure was I the car would slide sideways off the outcrop and roll slowly onto its side into the sand below. The fact I am writing this on the plane home and not from a hospital bed tells you just how wrong I was.

We did sand too on the Atlantic coast, but to be honest the Octa would probably have been better served by the standard all-terrain tyre on such a high grip surface. It was hilarious bombing around the dunes, seeing if I could get an enormous fountain of yellow sand to completely envelop the car, but save brushing up a little on that component of off-road driving technique – David would say much needed after my Freelander misadventure – I can’t say I learned a great deal about the car. But by then I already knew.

We finally came out of the dunes and onto tarmac with a straight 120-mile run south towards civilisation. There was no dual carriageway and nor was one needed. Out here the roads are wide, with excellent sightlines and essentially deserted. I probably shouldn’t say how long it took, but I’ve never covered that distance in less time in any other country since those far off enchanted days when you could drive overnight to the south of France as fast as your conveyance could carry you, with no more chance of having your collar felt than finding an edible sandwich in a service area.

I handed the Defender back to David’s team at Cape Town airport and boarded the aircraft on which I now sit. But not without a little look back at the car I was leaving behind. It looked, I am proud to say, as a Land Rover should. A filthy mess, resplendent in its grimy triumph. Despite what it had been put through, a test as hard as I’ve witnessed any car endure over that period of time, it came through with not so much as a squeak, let alone a rattle. Perhaps that is no more than should be expected, but there was a time, not that long ago, when such things could not be so easily guaranteed.

It is possible you have reached this point wondering why I’ve not mentioned the pachyderm in the pantry, and by that I don’t mean the eye-watering £145,300 price of the standard Octa, let alone the £160,800 of the ‘First Edition’ version I was driving, with its entirely unnecessary and rather out of place ‘chopped carbon’ bits of interior trim. These First Editions are sold out so it would appear the market at least believes them to be worth it. I refer instead to how these cars will be used.

Generally speaking it is good practice to test a car in the environment most owners will experience them. My evaluation of a Ferrari 12Cilindri’s ploughed field performance would, I feel, be of limited value. Likewise my detailed analysis of the limit handling of a Kia Stonic over the Pflanzgarten. So perhaps I should have trailed up the Kings Road from Fulham to Chelsea, along Sloane Street, hung a right near Harrods and rumbled into the West End. But David was curiously unavailable to lead such an expedition, so the Cederberg Mountains it sadly had to be.

There is a slightly less flippant point here. I know most Octa owners won’t get their wheels muddy, whatever tyres they wear. I know also that those who do will not subject their expensive acquisition to one tenth of the brutality I meted out to what was, to Land Rover, an ultimately expendable unit of product. Fair enough. But I can’t see any Octa prospect forking out those sums just because, say, it was a bit quicker than any previous Defender. Even though they’ll never ask their car to do it, to them it is crucial to know that it can. And quite right too.

But there is a slightly uncomfortable truth here, and it’s not that the Octa’s too-near standard Defender interior in no way reflects the amount of money being asked for it. It is that I don’t think there was anywhere I took that Octa a standard Defender (on comparable rubber) costing, ahem, the best part of £100,000 less would not follow. So I put this to Matt Becker, another old friend without whose approval of its dynamic characteristics no new JLR product gets signed off for production. And he didn’t disagree.

But here’s the thing. I don’t doubt a standard Defender could have done it, any more than I doubt it would have taken much longer, would have been far harder to do and been enormously less comfortable while doing it. And incomparably less fun. So that’s what you’re buying. You’re buying an ability to cross terrain a billy goat would take a long look at, and do so while barely even being jolted, let alone thrown around the cabin. The Octa makes the apparently impossible suddenly seem impossibly easy. And then it provides more pure off-road entertainment than any standard production Land Rover has come close to achieving. It’s a Defender with its abilities not merely broadened but, crucially, sharpened in every significant area.

Which takes me back to that point I made near the start about Land Rover missing a trick with this car. Because what the Defender is begging, no, screaming for, is for the short wheelbase 90 to be given the Octa treatment. Ask why it is not and an official spokesperson will say ‘never say never but the vast majority of our customers order 110s, so it makes sense for the Octa to be based on that car.’ Ask Becker and he’ll tell you there are very real difficulties packaging the full Octa rear suspension within the abbreviated platform. I don’t doubt that either. But I bet they could do something near as dammit the same.

But I wouldn’t want my Octa 90 to be the same. I’d want more. More power, a still wider track, a stripped-out interior, lightweight panels, a two-tonne target weight and a rear-drive only mode. Done right and with the right visuals, I think Land Rover could charge more too and it would still sell.

And now an apology. To all those who thought they might just reach the end of a Frankel car assessment with literally no chance of him mentioning a certain uniquely configured and long lived breed of German sports car: I’m sorry. Truly sorry. I should probably now be talking about Mercedes G-wagens. But my job is to explain to the best of my ability what this car is like and how it relates to the cars from which it is derived and I know no better way than this: the Octa is to a standard Defender what a GT3 is to a standard 911. And my vision for an Octa 90 would be the GT3 RS.

If David wants to lead me on another African adventure involving one of those, I can confirm my availability right now.

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