UTILITY THRILLS

In pre-pandemic times we used to have a regular Friday afternoon game of car speccing in the CCB office where we would use the online car configurators to build up a high-end vehicle and pur colleagues from a football magazine would decide a winner. Needless to say, it was generally only the fancier brands which were involved and Sam Skelton’s purple-on-purple Bentley would have been a bit much even for Liberace.

Naturally, in the week that the long-awaited new Defender was launched, Land Rover was the chosen brand but less than 30 seconds into the exercise there was much sucking of teeth and no small amount of expletives when the reality of the pricing and the vehicle itself was uncovered.

With a starting price of £44,000, the Defender is a long way from its utilitarian roots and indeed it proved impossible to build a basic workhorse example of the current