Land Rover Defender

Road Test

Your Say

Test date Wednesday, April 11, 2007 Price as tested £26,815

For Unrivalled off-road ability; torquier, cleaner, more frugal diesel; rugged charm

AgainstCrude road manners; surprisingly inflexible interior; poor standard equipment

How do you update an icon? How do you redefine something conceived generations ago in a very different world for a modern audience? Simple: tune into BBC1, 7pm, Saturday night.

There you’ll find the third series of the new run of Doctor Who getting into its stride. Its genius (and the reason it’s one of the Beeb’s most lucrative exports) is that, while its production standards may be modern, its concept and content have hardly changed. The good Doctor still galaxy-hops in a police box, even though not a single member of its target audience has the slightest idea what a police box is. When it lands, it is still to the noise created over 40 years ago of a BBC sound engineer dragging his car keys along the strings of a grand piano. And they can devote all the wonders of 21st century technology to creating the most terrifying of enemies, but they know the only ones we’ll have remembered by this time next week are a bunch of overgrown, pox-ridden pepperpots called Daleks.

It is to be hoped that the engineers of this new Land Rover Defender are avid viewers, for then they will have seen the formula for regeneration laid out before them. They will know that, whatever changes take place, the fundamental formula has to remain inviolate. Mess up the Defender and you don’t just spoil a car, you defile a national treasure. It should not be something done lightly.

But updated the Defender must be, in what is absolutely its last major rethink before it finally succumbs to the one obstacle even the world’s most famous off-roader can never hope to climb: the legislator’s pen. Even to make it this far it needed a new engine to cope with emissions rules, and that meant a new gearbox. And while they were there, the suspension and steering have been modified. But the biggest change is a near enough new interior – again to ensure compliance with the rule book, but also to bring a level of comfort and user-friendliness not yet seen in one such as this.