Ineos Grenadier

Is this spiritual successor to the original Land Rover Defender a vanity project or the real deal? When Land Rover retired the original Defender, petrochemicals billionaire and Defender buff Sir Jim Ratcliffe offered to buy the design rights and production-line tooling so that the model might live on. JLR refused and the result is this, the Ineos Grenadier.Now in its fourth year of production, the self-styled spiritual successor to the old Land Rover Defender has been born into a commercial hellscape of wild tariffs, inflation and stiffening regulations. It has also had to weather the recent insolvency of a major supplier, resulting in a fourth-month assembly hiatus at Hambach.Yet it gamely persists. Ineos Automotive is not out of the woods by any means – it has had to trim headcounts, is chugging cash investment and desperately needs a US manufacturing base – but today it is expanding in key markets and is introducing a handful of updates to the Grenadier for the 2026 model year. These are sensible car maker activities. We know the Grenadier is superb off-road, but here it undergoes a full road test to discover what it’s like in the broadest sense. How does it conduct itself day to day? How efficient is its BMW-sourced powerplant? Does it feel something of a pastiche, or is it the real deal for classic Defender lovers? Time to find out.