2007 Defender

On or around Fri, 11 Aug 2006 16:51:04 +0100, beamendsltd enlightened us thusly:

when did they do that? These would be the 2 holes they had to drill in the gear when people started complaining that their landy had no drive 'cos the splines had worn out, I assume, after trying sundry other fixes that didn't really work?

Most main dealers only sell a couple of Defenders a month these days. The bottom has dropped out of the Defender market and even hard pressed farmers have gone elsewhere in droves. Defender has gone past the point of no return and no amount of tweaking the dash and an engine transplant will get the market back. This is what comes from a pitiful lack of investment in the product over more than twenty years. All those Eastern pick-ups are a lost sale for Land Rover. Anyone blind to this reality must have their heads buried shoulder deep in sand. I'll just keep my '84 110HCPU going for as long as practical before buying something with air-bags and a bit of room in the cab. Since it is a tool for a job, I'm not worried if it is scrapped in 12 years rather than 24 as long as it is civilised and does the job required of it. If a Hi-Lux or similar is good enough for the Taliban then it is certainly good for me mechanically. I quite fancy a Nissan but knowing me I will probably end up with a rare TDI300 HCPU. Knock some sense into me someone before I buy another Defender!

Huw

The sensible thing to do is to buy another defender ..... and then give it to me. :-)

Steve

Sorry to say I have to disagree 100% with all of the above. I'll leave it at that rather than risk a falling out!

Richard

On or around Fri, 11 Aug 2006 17:47:47 +0100, "Bob Hobden" enlightened us thusly:

see my treatise on the subject of off-road control and engine characteristics...

Actually, I reckon there's some mileage in having an "off-road" and "on-road" setting for the engine tuning - I think they went part-way towards this on the TD5, altering the throttle response when in low box?

On-road, a nice flat torque curve as wide as possible is good and fine control at the lower end is not really relevant. Off-road you want a slower pedal response and you don't really want all the torque coming in with a bang, as this can lose you traction by inadvertently applying too much extra go at the wrong moment.

It was pre-production. The cross drilling was (apparently) deleted for full procuction as a cost cutting measure on the LT77. This was, amazingly, allowed to continue into R380 production. The aftermarket has put the holes back (except for very early boxes, for which an oil thrower is available from the aftermaket), I've not seen a Genuine Parts version recently to know if LR have. I worked for the manager responsible at another motor manufacturers, and lets say he didn't seem to see admiting mistakes as a good career move. The above might seem incredible, but another manufacturer I worked for had a brake problem that led to their largest customer refusing to use any of his fleet. An ex-machanic, with no engineering training and zero understanding of hydraulics was tasked to solve the problem. Accidentaly, an conterctor who really did understand hydraulics was brought in for another project and took an interest in the brake problem. It took him about 20mins to find the problem. Guess what - it was 2 cross-drilled holes again! A trawl through the paper work found that it was again a cost-down excersize, the descision being made by..... a manager, not a hydraulics engineer. When you work in such environments, it's easy to see why we have no industry left.

Richard

Ahem! - Defender sales are at a peak (25,000). It's even profitable again. The 2 main dealers in this area sell a lot more than a couple a month - each! Far from declining, Defender ownership is on the up in these parts - big time - and must be nationaly, by definition. There are wide variations from area to area certainly - but that's down to dealers attitude rather than the product. In Cheshire you don't see many - in Derbyshire you keep tripping over them.

Richard

Hi,

local salesman claimed, the 2007 Defender comes with independent suspension. I hope he was lying. Perhaps he tried to trick me to buy one of his two SE models, loaded with all imaginable bells and whistles. I use 4x4 mainly as a tractor, so it's hard to utilize all those air cons,

Looks like bureaucracy in Brussels an market prospects in US managed to ruin another fine piece of equipment.

Cheers, Kalev

Um... For those of us to whom anything bonnet and below is a mystery, why would independent suspension be a bad thing?

Parking skills are better in Cheshire?

On or around Sat, 12 Aug 2006 08:20:44 +0100, beamendsltd enlightened us thusly:

no need to fall out. that lot was my opinion, and we're all entitled to our own opinions. But the problem you had with reversing the van was undoubtedly because it's got too high a reverse gear, and I have myself noted this on TDi discos when moving a big trailer - but on them you always have the option of using low-reverse.

for some reason, modern vehicles are equipped with a reverse gear that means it'll do about 30 flat out in reverse, a trait for which there's hardly ever any need, and as a result, when you want to reverse upslope at about 2 mph, you have to do it at less-than-idle speed and slip the clutch.

On or around Sat, 12 Aug 2006 11:46:58 +0100, Torak enlightened us thusly:

It wouldn't, necessarily. it would depend on how it's done. It might even be better than a live axle - live axles are not the perfect answer to everything - high unsprung weight and poor ground clearance under the diff, for 2 reasons.

for really extreme off-road, you might find it hard to get as much articulation, and it's probably a more difficult proposition to modify.

It all rather depends on how the suspension is done.

When Toyota made the move from live to independent front suspension on the 4WD Hilux their NZ sales dropped to virtually nothing. The independent ones were significantly less capable off road and no better mannered on road. It took Toyota 9 months or so to reintroduce a live axle model and they instantly regained their position as best selling vehicle in it's class.

I really hope LR don't make the same mistake, but I think it's highly likely that they will, and almost a certainty that having made the mistake they won't rectify it.

Dunno. It doesn't seem to have hurt Steyr-Puch much that way. Haflingers and Pinzgauers haven't struck me as being limited in wheel articulation, though I have to admit that I've not tried measureing one.

A lot of the Really Serious Off-Road Stuff (Steyr-Puch, Tatra - that sort of thing) has always used independent suspension, so I'd have thought the hope should be that if L-R go for independent suspension they should be resourced to do it properly, rather than using off-the

-shelf bits from elsewhere in the F*rd empire. Of course, all this may be moot if - as suggested in some of the finance pages last week

- Land-Rover and Jaguar may be sold to GAZ. If so, I guess at least it's an outfit that knows about off-road machinery:

On Sat, 12 Aug 2006 12:32:46 +0100, Austin Shackles scribbled the following nonsense:

I always use low box when reversing with a trailer.

Been driving a 7.5 tonne Marecedes truck (bored during my summer holiday....) and that has such a stupid reverse gear it is unreal, tickover reverse is nearly 10 mph, which is very interesting backing onto docks at depots!!!

Having said that, 60 in 6th gear is pulling about 1300rpm, which could make for interesting top speed as it red lines at 3000....

Given that I own both a Defender and a Pinzgauer I finally have something I can speak relatively authoritatively on ;-)

Given what I've seen, I'd say the Pinzgauer definately has a little less axle articulation than a stock Defender, and also behaves worse under axle-twisting situations when unladen than a Defender will. With the pinzgauer, if you drive a front wheel up onto a boulder, without a load in the rear the opposite side rear will not compress much, meaning that the vehicle will tilt to one side and lift wheels much more readily than the Defender will. The Defender will roll the body less by compressing the opposite-side rear suspension.

The pinzgauer and haflinger make up for this by having portal axles and differential locks, which means my pinz, about the same size and weight as a modern Disco 3, can go over the bumps better than a 90, let alone the 110 that I already own. If you turn off the diff locks though it lifts wheels readily and grinds to a halt quite quickly. The haflinger is apparently better off-road than a series landy, with the same caveat, as long as it has the diff locks on. There is almost no room at all on the pinzgauer or haflinger to upgrade the suspension in any way.

Steyr-Puch also designed the Mercedes G-Wagen, another vehicle that is criticised for lack of suspension articulation, but more than makes up for it by having the diff locks although no portal axles or independent suspension this time.

I've never been entirely sure where independent suspension is better than a live axle. One area that it gains is that you can avoid having the axle hanging down under the chassis much more easily than with a live axle, also they're usually better at soaking up the bumps at speed than a live axle. Two disadvantages though are that my pinz loses 4 inches of ground clearance if you fully load it, and you lose ground clearance again if one wheel is pushed up by a bump, in both situations a live axle would maintain ground clearance.

Another area that independent suspension has an advantage over live axles surprised me; simplicity. I'd have thought that a live axle would be simpler than independent suspension, but the pinz and haflinger show how independent suspension can be incredibly simple indeed and also well protected against knocks and dirt.

/excellent stuff snipped/

Thanks for that - I've learned a lot there.

Same goes for Tatra's big stuff, too: half-axles pivoting on the central spine of the chassis.

Sounds like there are trade-offs, with beam axles having advantages in some respects and independent suspension in others. I'm not against the idea of a Landy with independent suspension per se, but it's got to be supsension designed to do the job that a Landy's suspension needs to do, not just something handy from the parts bin.

That's the way the pinz does it. The pinz differentials were designed by the same chap who did the Tatra ones, and he threw the rule-book out, they are odd indeed. I have a spare diff that I'll be putting on mine to replace the fairly-new-but-cracked diff that's on there now, once that's off I'll be pulling it apart just to play with the innards, it's a nice design.

Always true.

TBH I doubt any new redesigned Defender will be what the off-roaders want, most farmers just don't need excellent off-road ability, a toyota pick-up with big tyres will do for most of them. The military appear to be looking elsewhere for their vehicle needs too.

On or around Sat, 12 Aug 2006 14:18:00 +0100, Simon Isaacs enlightened us thusly:

I assume it's limited either by a limiter or by lack of power... but 's like I say, for some reason, reverse gears are silly-high. might be cost-cutting, use the same gear as first with an idler chucked in, rather than a separate ratio.

the bigger wagons have high and low boxes, some of 'em, I recall shunting artics with twin splitters, and the low reverse is just as good as it is on a landy, specially when reversing a 40' box trailer.