Land Rover Defender EV Stymied By Insurmountable Engineering Issues

Big internal combustion engines have stuck around longer than most of us expected. Remember when Jeremy Clarkson said the Aston Martin V12 Vantage was pretty much the end of that back in 2009? Yet here we are, more than 15 years later, and you can still buy a gas guzzler if you want. That includes the Land Rover Defender, which won’t go fully electric until it switches over to the next-gen model because doing so with the current platform would be “really, really hard.”

That’s according to JLR’s Chief Commercial Officer Lennard Hoornik, who recently sat down for an interview with Autocar. “Electrifying the current ‘L663’ car, on its D7x platform, is not what we want,” he insisted. “The L663 is brilliant at what it does and we do have a [four-cylinder] plug-in hybrid version already, but it’s not easy to find the extra space you need within that chassis for batteries, given the axle packaging and capability that it needs.”

That’s not to say there will never be an electric Defender. JLR is heading in a radical new direction, for better or worse, and electrification is the name of its game. But this Defender simply wasn’t designed to accommodate a fully battery-powered setup.

“We have said that we will make an electric production model for each of our new brands [Range Rover, Defender, Discovery and Jaguar] and remain committed to that,” Hoornik added. “But finding the space on the current Defender platform is really, really hard, so we will need to use something different.”

As Hoornik alluded, Defender currently has a wide range of available powertrains, from a plug-in hybrid four-cylinder to a 5.0-liter supercharged V8. Land Rover will even sell you a BMW-sourced twin-turbo V8 in the Defender Octa. That’s great news if you love internal combustion, of course, and I can’t imagine there are too many people sad about the Defender EV being delayed.

Of all the high-performance luxury SUVs in the space, we’ve already seen the Mercedes G-Class go electric. (It still has a V8 version for now.) Land Rover has also been teasing the Range Rover EV for 2025. Anyone interested in such a rig will have to spring for one of those or buy a Rivian as most other automakers are finding ways to keep ICE around. Some have stuck with V8s, though others are springing for high-powered turbo V6s—and even then, those don’t drive past too many gas stations. Depending on who you ask, that’s just one of the Defender’s endearing traits

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