Electric Land Rover Defender will need to wait

The Land Rover Defender will go electric, but not until towards the end of the decade due to limitations with the current-generation model.

Speaking to UK magazine Autocar, JLR (formerly Jaguar Land Rover) chief operating officer Lennard Hoornik said it’s not possible to turn the current Defender into an electric vehicle (EV), due to packaging constraints within its existing platform.

“Electrifying the current ‘L663’ car, on its D7x platform, is not what we want,” Mr Hoornik told Autocar.

“The L663 is brilliant at what it does and we do have a [four-cylinder] plug-in hybrid (PHEV) 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.

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“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.

“But finding the space on the current Defender platform is really, really hard, so we will need to use something different.”

Mr Hoornik didn’t confirm whether the electric Defender would be based on an entirely new platform but with its existing bodywork, or if a next-generation version of the SUV would launch later this decade with the ability to be solely battery-powered.

While JLR is currently testing and will shortly introduce an electric Range Rover, this is based on an entirely different platform to the Defender, which was one of the last models to launch on the D7 architecture.

Because of this, JLR insiders told Autocar it’s impossible to fit the larger straight-six 3.0-litre engines and plug-in hybrid systems from the current Range Rover and Range Rover Sport into the Defender, as they’re both on a newer-generation platform.

In October 2023, JLR confirmed it’ll produce EVs across the Range Rover, Defender, Jaguar and Discovery brands as a part of its plans to have nine battery-powered models in showrooms by 2030.

To do so, it announced an investment of €1.3 billion ($2.2bn) into the Nitra, Slovakia factory where the Defender and Discovery are currently built. The electric Range Rover and Range Rover Sport – along with Jaguar’s EVs – will be produced in the UK.

By 2039, JLR plans to have no internal-combustion engine-powered vehicles in global showrooms. This is four years after Europe and the UK will ban new petrol and diesel vehicles from sale.

The Defender is by far JLR’s most popular model in Australia, with 3209 examples delivered to customers locally last year.

It was also the best-selling $80,000-plus large SUV last year, just 52 deliveries ahead of the BMW X5.

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