LOVE or hate the Land Rover Defender, its place in off-road history and fourbie folklore is undeniable. Personally, I have countless Landie memories growing up in southwest rural Britain with a collie on the passenger seat and a bale or two in the back, so it’s very much the former for me. And, like many, it was with sadness when I learned JLR would put the iconic Defender out to pasture (one more time) ending a bloodline that effectively started in the 1940s.
Perhaps in denial of the looming end like many enthusiasts around the world, you considered grabbing one of the extraordinarily expensive final editions and squirrelling it away in a shed somewhere. Perhaps you thought about picking up an older tired version to maybe restore or just hold on to for posterity’s sake.
Whatever romantic notion you may have considered to preserve the Defender in either its aluminium-bodied form or simply the memory, I bet you didn’t once think about approaching Land Rover and offer to buy the tools and manufacturing rights to save the model from an arguably untimely end. But that’s exactly what Ineos CEO Jim Ratcliffe did.
Despite the backing of one of the largest industrial chemicals company in the world, negotiations didn’t
