The past two months have been a bit of a roller coaster concerning our 2020 Land Rover Defender. Or, more specifically, three Land Rover Defenders. If you haven’t been following the saga of our efforts to order and off-road the least expensive Land Rover Defender, you can check out those videos on TFLcar’s YouTube channel.
Today, though, is a happy day indeed. We were finally able to get our hands on another new Defender! And this time, we’re looking forward to testing it extensively over the coming months. There are a few key differences with this car, and that’s not just down to the fact that this one’s blue.
What’s different with this Defender?
With this third run, we pushed to get another base model ($55,000-ish) Defender to keep to the original premise of our series. The goal was to show you just what you could get with a no-frills, no-fuss option. It would be just what you needed to go off-road, and nothing you didn’t — barring any shortcomings the base model revealed in more extensive testing. Now, though, that’s been cut short as this new car is significantly better equipped. That’s especially true under the hood, where you’ll discover this car has the 395 horsepower 3.0-liter inline-six mild hybrid engine, rather than the base 296 horsepower 2.0-liter turbo.
Instead of the steel wheels, this new car also has 20-inch aluminum alloys instead. That’s not ideal, but it does have Goodyear Wrangler All-Terrain Adventure tires. That will help when we take it off-road, and obviously we’re going to do that quite a bit. Inside, the interior is specced with tan power-adjustable seats. However, it does not have the front bench option. All-in, this 2020 Land Rover Defender SE (a couple rungs above the base trim) costs $71,115. That’s $16,000 more than our original Defender, but — full disclosure here — TFL did not end of paying that difference. Land Rover offered this car at no extra cost in light of the situation with our past two models. The dealership manager over at Flatirons Land Rover in Broomfield, Colorado and even the JLR engineer who worked on the original car threw in a couple extra goodies as well.
While we obviously had a rocky experience getting to this point with our new Land Rover Defender(s), Land Rover remained engaged throughout the process and did what they could to help sort out the issues. That sort of response really comes down to you guys, who engaged with us while we documented this experience by watching our videos. We deeply appreciate your support, and stay tuned for more Defender videos coming soon!
