Land Rover commits to Defender

Land Rover's global sales are on the rise, driven to a significant degree by the Range Rover Evoque.

The small but fully-featured SUV is proving a lucrative newcomer for the off-road brand that has been in the business since 1948. According to Director of Programmes at Land Rover, expatriate Australian Murray Dietsch, Evoque sales have exceeded expectations.

"For the first 18 months we sold over 170,000. For us that's a reasonable success story..." he told motoring.com.au at the Frankfurt motor show earlier in the week, fresh from the global unveiling of the Range Rover Hybrid.

The Evoque's commercial appeal contrasts with that of the company's Defender – a vehicle that can trace its direct line of descent from the original Series 1 Land Rover of 1948. Land Rover is head-down working on a replacement for the Defender, one that will meet new emissions and safety standards to be introduced throughout Europe by 2016.

An all-new model to replace one that sells around 20,000 units a year doesn't seem like money well spent, when that same money would achieve a lot more, such as updating the Evoque and developing new variants of the more modern design.

So has that proposition been raised within Land Rover?

"No, is the answer," Dietsch replies with nary a trace of horror. "There's no talk of 'let's cut our losses' or anything like that. Defender is something – albeit a product that's got some age to it – quintessentially a Land Rover. It's what Land Rover stands for."

But it's a commercial reality, isn't it? There would be better return on investment spending money otherwise earmarked for Defender on the much more modern Evoque.

"That is one of the quandaries that we face in this business..." Dietsch answers. "We don't intend to abandon Defender at all..."

"We think it's a product that Land Rover can't do without.

"Could you have a Land Rover company without having a Defender? That's the kind of navel-gazing we do often.

"The answer is 'no', we're definitely keen to come up with a successor – and we're working to achieve that."

It sounds like sentiment is in the driving seat, however, and particularly with Dietsch's admission that the Defender doesn't sell in all the 177 countries where Land Rover has a presence.

Unfortunately, furthermore, one of those countries where the Defender is not sold happens to be the USA – still one of the biggest markets in the world. That's part of the reason the Defender struggles to sell more than 20,000 units around the world each year.

"Volumes are relatively small and there are a lot of markets where we just don't sell Defender, and haven't sold Defender in for years... North America for instance," Dietsch admits.

"We wouldn't be building and selling it if there wasn't a market for them... Every time we think it's coming to the end of its life in its current form there's been a reprieve or something changes and we've been able to continue...

"We've been selling Defenders around the 20,000-unit mark for probably the last five years now, but... at the end of 2015 we start to see some fairly significant legislative changes from an engine emissions perspective, but also from a crash perspective, that are going to prevent us from being able to sell it in the UK and Europe.

"And when you pull those larger volumes out, then it becomes probably a bit less [viable]."

So the new car is aimed at retaining the already borderline sales volumes in those regions where the Defender is already sold. Wouldn't it help if the new model could sell in all those 177 regional markets as well – including North America?

"Absolutely," Dietsch responds. "The reason why Defender does what it does – the way it does at the moment – is just because it is an aging product. Any new product, we would not want to limit ourselves from the 177 markets we sell into. We would be developing anything new without any restriction on where we want to sell it."

Combined domestic sales of the Falcon and Territory in Australia outnumber global sales of Defender, yet Ford is ceasing local manufacture in Australia while Land Rover perseveres with the Defender. Killing the Falcon name presents a case for dispatching icons once they're past their use-by date. So it's hard to escape the conviction that Land Rover is ignoring dog-eat-dog realities in the world of automotive business. Dietsch's reply does nothing to change that view.

"At a very senior level in the company, there is an overwhelming desire to have the Defender continue in some form in the future. And it's not just a view that's shared by one person; there's an enormous number of people in the company that want to see Defender continue."

Ultimately there's just one debating point that would help Land Rover over the line, and it's the final word from Dietsch.

"We wouldn't be making the car if we weren't making money."

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