Gallery: Land Rover Defender gets the axe in 2015
The Land Rover Defender - one of the few classic cars you can still buy new - is to go out of production in 2015. The iconic off-roader, which has been on sale since 1948 in one form or another gets the chop in the face of escalating safety regulations and a changing market place. Land Rover has confirmed that it will be replaced.
The Land Rover Defender is identified with the UK in much the same way as the K6 telephone box, black London taxis, and the Mini - and it's now the last bastion of original 1940s automotive hardware. And it's also loved by HRH The Queen. Okay, so the number of parts shared between the Land Rover of 1948 and the Defender of today are miniscule, but it's still fundamentally the same vehicle. And to show you just how much it hasn't changed, here's a gallery of each major model through the years,
Enjoy the gallery.
Land Rover Series III V8 (1979)
The Land Rover finally received a detuned low-compression version of the Range Rover's V8 engine. After market tuners had been doing this for a while, and then Land Rover offered it as a option for export-market models in the mid-1970s. Power was down to less than 100bhp, but torque was still as healthy as ever, and most importantly, all of that additional grunt really helped cement the Land Rover's position as the world's best off-roader vehicle.
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