Land Rover Defender Octa first drive review

Africa is the last place you want to get lost in. 50 years ago a mad Frenchman ran out of fuel, water and directions, and in his Saharan fever dreams cooked up the greatest motorsport adventure known to man. It’s been over a decade since geopolitics and petro-dollars drove the Dakar out of Africa but the vast emptiness, epic vistas, endless dirt tracks, virgin dunes and the sheer romance of the continent have brought us to the mother continent, to test the 4x4 that will underpin Land Rover’s works Dakar entry from next year. This is the Land Rover Defender Octa, the suffix an abbreviation for octahedron, the most common shape of a cut diamond like what’s on your engagement ring. The diamond is also the hardest natural mineral and it’s an appropriate tag for the most hardcore Defender ever made. But first let me tell you what the Octa definitely is not.

The Land Rover Defender Octa sits 28mm taller than the standard Defender, taking the Defender’s 291mm ground clearance up to 319mm

Land Rover Defender Octa design

Go-faster SUVs are nothing new, from BMW M and AMG to Porsche and Lamborghini, bonkers-fast SUVs are in abundant supply. But what they all do is slap on super-grippy road tyres, lower the body, stiffen the dampers, and basically use every trick in the book to ape a sports car. That’s where the Defender Octa carves its own path. Rather than being dropped, the Octa sits 28mm taller taking the Defender’s 291mm ground clearance up to 319mm. Water wading goes up from 900mm to a full metre. The track is 68mm wider and you get the option of factory-fitted, all-terrain, triple-ply Goodyear Wrangler DuraTrac RT tyres on 20-inch motorsport wheels. These are housed in wheel arches that are flared and so is the nose to feed the Bavarian horses.

The Defender Octa is powered by a BMW 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8 with an Octa-specific intake, exhaust and tuning to put out 626bhp and 750Nm

Land Rover Defender Octa engine and performance

The motor is BMW’s familiar 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8 with an Octa-specific intake, exhaust and tuning to put out 626bhp and 750Nm of torque – similar figures to the outgoing BMW M5 CS. This is not a plug-in hybrid but you do get 48-volt mild-hybrid tech to improve throttle responses and give you 50Nm of overboost to launch the 2.5-tonne Octa to 100kmph in 4 seconds flat. On tarmac. On gravel it will take a wee bit more than that but you do get off-road launch control, which in the interests of rigorous road testing we shall shortly test.

The axle hardware of the Land Rover Defender Octa is also new

Land Rover Defender Octa suspension

The Octa isn’t merely a hotted-up Defender; the axle hardware is also new. The steering rack has been quickened, from 17:1 to 14:1, same as the Range Rover Sport SV. There are longer wishbones, new hubs and uprights, along with the associated mountings and bushes to ensure the roll centre height, and thus the roll axis, remains unchanged. The benefit is that despite the raised height you get significantly less body roll when you hustle the Octa, and credit for that goes to the piece-de-resistance, the new Tenneco 6D semi-active dampers. Combined with air springs, the continuously-variable dampers are hydraulically interlinked and have three separate valves – one for compression, second for rebound and a third to disconnect one damper from the other three as needed. This is the hydraulic equivalent of disconnecting the anti-roll bar, thus eliminating the need for anti-roll bars. The real-world effect is to all but eliminate pitch and roll during fast driving along with greater axle articulation and exploiting that additional ground clearance on demanding off-road trails.

The Octa mode sets up the Defender like a rally car with 80 per cent of the torque going to the rear

Land Rover Defender Octa ride and handling

In effect the Octa is a Defender made to drop a gear and hammer down terrain you’d normally go through great lengths to avoid. We will go rock crawling in a bit, first we have hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres of graded gravel roads in the middle of nowhere to live out our wildest Dakar dreams. We occasionally sight 80kmph speed limit signs, but with no traffic in either direction, we are free to drive as fast as the interplay of talent and road side furniture will permit.

This is where we punch Octa into Octa mode, via a long press on the new button grafted onto the steering wheel under the horn pad. It sets up the Defender like a rally car with 80 per cent of the torque going to the rear, more compliant damping to soak up the bumps and ruts, revised ABS calibration, and an enthusiastic loosening of traction and stability control.

Needless to say the DuraTrac tyres deliver staggering grip on gravel, the traction control letting the tyres spin up to clear the loose top soil and dig into the harder surface below. There’s a squirm from the rear needing a wee bit of corrective lock and most astonishingly the semi-active dampers keeps the body remarkably level, with none of the extreme squat you get in big fast cars doing launch control runs. Octa mode maintains the SUV’s ride height but hikes its damping reserves to maintain body control, increases the roll rate to maximise off-road traction, and disables the roll stability control. Switch off ESP and you can back it into corners and pull big power slides on the exit – this is deliberate; Land Rover has tuned the Octa to be playful and adjustable. The faster steering rack lets you chuck it more eagerly into corners while also permitting quicker application of corrective steering lock. There’s off-road ABS tuning that allows a degree of tyre lock to create a mound of mud, sand or snow ahead of the tyres to aid the 400mm Brembo brakes and reduce stopping distances. It even knows when the Octa is airborne and pre-loads the dampers to cushion the landing also ensuring the rebound doesn’t bounce the SUV out of the track.

Dips and ruts, even the washboards, they make no difference to the Land Rover Defender Octa’s composure

The huge takeaway though is the amount of punishment the Octa can take. I’m driving at least 40 per cent faster than is prudent. In anything else these speeds would be flirting with a very expensive interrogation of the scenery. The Octa – it soaks it all up. The dips and ruts, even the washboards, they make no difference to the Octa’s composure; the suspension shrugs it off as if we are hitting expansion joints on the expressway. Now I have to clarify that the regular Defender would also be able to deal with all the terrain we tested the Octa over; in fact the photo crew’s Defender 130 was a constant presence everywhere we went. But I am also convinced that a regular Defender wouldn’t be half as much fun, or half as comfortable, or even half as accommodating to the murderous abuse we subjected the Octa to. The Octa is tough as nails. Or a diamond.

All of which comes at no expense to traditional Land Rover strengths. If anything the hardware changes deliver 119mm more axle articulation, the tyres find grip where your shoes do not, and the Octa claws its way up impossible looking boulders that nobody in their right mind would subject a luxury SUV to. In the dunes – we are in Africa after all – less aggressive tyres would probably help it float over the sand, but even if you drive like a chimp the immense torque of the V8 makes it impossible to get stuck.

The off-road capability of the Defender Octa is seriously impressive

There’s another downside to optioning the 20-inch DuraTrac tyres. Land Rover will lock the top speed to 160kmph. That’s fast enough for dirt tracks but on the highway you’ll be better off with the 250kmph top speed permitted by the 22-inch Michelin Primacy all season tyres. There is a third tyre option, 20-inch BF Goodrich all-terrain tyres with a 209kmph top speed. On and off-road, all our driving was on the DuraTrac tyres and on the former you can feel it moving a bit on the tread blocks. There is also a slight fidget to the otherwise incredibly plush ride of the Defender and a noticeable layer of tyre roar. A single tap on the Octa button and you get into Dynamic mode that tightens the steering, boosts throttle sharpness, increases roll resistance by 67 per cent and maximises pitch control. The differences in the latter two are particularly evident as you cycle through the different modes, though advanced all-terrain tyres with such huge tyre blocks aren’t the best for testing outright cornering on tarmac. Dynamic mode with the gear selector in Sport also opens up the quad exhaust pipes, easily drowning out the tyre roar, but that said this isn’t as shouty, as exuberant, as a Mercedes-AMG G63.

Prices for the Defender Octa start from ₹2.59 crore

Land Rover Defender Octa pricing

Prices for the Land Rover Defender Octa start from ₹2.59 crore (ex-showroom), while the Defender Octa Edition One, which will be available for the first year of production, is priced at ₹2.79 crore (ex-showroom). Bookings for the SUV will officially open soon and you can also check out our first drive review of the SUV on the evo India YouTube channel.