Land Rover Defender Octa

Gaydon goes very large indeed on both performance and 4×4 capability for its very first ultimate Defender

On a rutted, unsealed gravel road about 200 miles north of Cape Town, South Africa, a very special new Land Rover – the Defender Octa – is doing its thing. It’s been doing it all day, to be honest – over rock, sand, mud and 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 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 Cayenne, Lamborghini Urus and even Mercedes-AMG G-Class 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 4×4 that, it seems, can do absolutely everything and go everywhere that a regular Defender 110 can but an awful lot more quickly.

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