The latest reports from Land Rover suggest that the firm has pushed back the next version of the Defender off-roader until well past 2030 from a planned launch date that was believed to be in the next two years. 

New Jaguar Land Rover boss PB Balaji is understood to have made the decision in order to save money in the short term, but part of the reasoning behind the shift is that the current version of the car is selling quite well, accounting for almost a third of total company sales. 

​Land Rover has been hit by a combination of high production costs, a devastating computer hack that left it treading water for months, the Chinese market downturn and tariffs imposed on imported cars by US president Donald Trump. 

The new version of the Defender is going to come with fully electric and hybrid options, and will be based on the same EMA platform as the upcoming Range Rover Sport Electric. 

The Range Rover Electric will be the company’s next car to launch, itself pushed back by more than a year because of unspecified delays that are believed to be partly internal and partly down to supplier issues. 

It does also mean that the electric Mercedes-Benz G-Class gets the field (and the trail, and the dried out riverbed, etc) to itself for quite some time to come. 

In an effort to cut costs and boost sales in its biggest market, the US, Land Rover announced earlier in August that it plans to build a new version of the Defender in the country in conjunction with Stellantis using one of the French carmaker’s platforms. 

These cars will likely be built on the SLTA platforms currently used by Jeep as well as other brands in the Stellantis portfolio. 

A Defender-badged model that hasn’t (yet) been pushed back is the new Defender Sport, which is expected to launch at some point in early 2027. 

The smaller version of the Defender will feature electric and hybrid powertrains and is set to replace the rather old Discovery Sport model. 

Both of them, of course, are spiritual successors to the Freelander SUV of the 1990s, but that name is being used by a joint venture between Jaguar Land Rover and Chery over in China, with the cars set to come to the UK soon.