An electric version of the Land Rover Defender won’t arrive until its next generation due to packaging difficulties with the current model’s platform.
The Land Rover Defender will not be available with electric power until the end of the decade – at the earliest.
An electric version of the Land Rover off-road SUV has been ruled out for the current model due to packaging difficulties with its current platform, Autocar reports.
JLR chief commercial officer Lennard Hoornik said the ‘D7x’ platform found in the current L663-generation Defender – also used for the Land Rover Discovery – does not have the extra space required for a fully electric drivetrain.
“Electrifying the current ‘L663’ car, on its D7x platform, is not what we want,” Hoornik said.
“The L663 is brilliant at what it does and we do have a [four-cylinder] plug-in hybrid version already, but it’s not easy to find the extra space you need within that chassis for batteries, given the axle packaging and capability that it needs.”
Autocar added the current Land Rover Defender does not support the six-cylinder plug-in hybrid with larger batteries available in the Range Rover and Range Rover Sport, which use the separate and newer ‘MLA-Flex’ architecture.
“We have said that we will make an electric production model for each of our new brands [Range Rover, Defender, Discovery and Jaguar] and remain committed to that,” Hoornik added.
“But finding the space on the current Defender platform is really, really hard, so we will need to use something different.”
The current Land Rover Defender was unveiled in 2019 in three-door 90 and five-door 110 bodies, followed by the extended 130 eight-seater in 2022.
Land Rover could decide to launch an electric Defender to be sold alongside the current model, however Hoornik suggested it would “need to come at quite a significant step in the evolution of the Defender”.
A 2023 report said a smaller ‘Defender Sport’ with an electric drivetrain would launch in 2027 on JLR’s new EMA architecture in an expansion of the Defender line-up, but there has been no news on the model since.
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