Update: We’ve Owned Our Land Rover Defender For About 3 Weeks, And It’s Been Broken Almost The Whole Time

A check engine light is keeping our new Defender at the service center

Our Land Rover Defender is still broken

The Defender is still broken?

A few weeks ago, the whole TFL team was excited to take delivery of the latest addition to the long-term fleet. This 2020 Land Rover Defender is one of the least expensive versions you can buy, with a sticker price just north of $55,000. That’s reasonably affordable considering how much they can cost. Not just that, but you still get a healthy amount of off-road capability to boot. There’s just one problem: Our Defender has suffered several issues that have kept it in the shop nearly the entire time we’ve owned it.

In the past three weeks, the only time Roman and Tommy were actually able to drive it was almost immediately after taking delivery. They took the Defender off-road in the Colorado mountains for TFLoffroad. After that trip, the first warning sign emerged — a check engine light. Since then, the car went through a series of other issues, which we’ve documented in our first, second and third update videos on the situation.

Now, to be clear Land Rover has been well engaged in trying to sort the problem. They sent an engineer over from the UK to take a look at the car. Technicians also went through a host of repairs to try and solve the check engine light. Replacing the ignition coils did not seem to help and now they’re looking into air delivery to see if any faults are coming up there. Strangely, the car’s computer is not communicating exactly what’s causing the fault code, even with the check engine light illuminated.

So the saga continues, and we’ll provide more updates when technicians are hopefully able to rectify the issue. Some of you in the TFL community have mentioned “lemon lawing” it. While the criteria for doing that is different in most states, of course we’re looking at having our broken Defender repaired so we can extract several months of use from it as the first (and best) solution. Stay tuned as we learn more!