All of us in the TFL office have been excited to take delivery of this long-term 2020 Land Rover Defender. Finally, the iconic name returned to our shores, and what’s more you can get this specific car for just a shade over $50,000. You have to special order it, mind you — good luck finding one on a dealer lot for that price — but it finally arrived in early October. Unfortunately, within 48 hours and 200 miles, it developed a fault. After the Defender’s first off-road excursion, the car threw a check engine light.
What’s the saying? “Told you so?”
Indeed, many of you out there in the TFL community did, and took to the comments section of that first video to express your vindication:
Land Rover fixed the engine issue, but…
Fast forward a few days from that original video, and Land Rover technicians sorted the issue related to the check engine light. They said they performed a software update to fix the problem, checked the spark plugs and rotated the ignition coils to see if any were faulty and causing cylinder misfires. Fortunately, no more engine codes came up as they did that. The Defender was back in action, but then we discovered another issue when we returned to the office — the 360-degree camera system is inoperable.
When Andre returned to the office and threw the Defender in reverse, the rear camera did not appear on the center infotainment screen. When he tried to access the cameras directly through the infotainment system, there’s an error saying “Cameras not available.” The Tow Assist system is also unavailable, so he immediately returned the Defender to our local Land Rover dealer. The dealer said that they needed to run a hard reboot on the whole vehicle so all the systems talk to each other. We picked up the vehicle last Thursday, October 15, with the news that a bad module is to blame for the camera malfunction. The part is currently on backorder, so there is no estimate as to when the issue will be fixed.
Check out more on the situation in the video below, and we’ll continue to post more updates as we try to sort out the Defender’s current issues.
