Land Rover Defender OCTA – We Try To Break It!

This is the new Defender Octa, the wildest Land Rover, and therefore, one of the most extreme 4x4s ever made. And that over there, that is wild and windy South Africa. You can probably see where we're going with this. In this video, we're going to be putting the £160,000 Octa Edition 1 through the ringer in a harsh and unforgiving landscape. Well, harsh and unforgiving for the car. To find out if a top-shelf spec means it can handle everything we throw at it, we're talking about a rally stage. Off-roading, trails, on-road tests, wading. And stick around to the end if you want to see how it handles itself in the sand dunes. OK, so let's start with that name, Octa. It refers to the eight sides of a diamond, apparently, because a diamond is the hardest and most durable mineral on Earth. We shall see whether the same can be said about this car. How do you tell an Octa apart from a standard Defender? Well, there's a few telltale signs. You've got different front and rear bumpers. You've got quad exhausts at the back. You've got a different grille here to feed more air into the more powerful engine, which we'll talk about in a bit. You've got a unique faro green colour on this Edition 1. Well, it was faro green before we covered it in dirt. You've got bits of chopped carbon fibre trim. Monster wheel arches, 68 millimetres wider than the standard car. 33-inch tyres, 28 millimetres more ride height, and that's probably enough for you to be getting on with. But the bit that you should really care about right now is under here, the engine. So you can get the standard Defender with the 5.0-litre supercharged V8, but this is a BMW-sourced 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8 producing 626 brake horsepower, which is quite a lot of power. Land Rover also claims it'll do 0-60 in 3.8 seconds. 3.8! That's ridiculous! That's the same as a Ferrari F50. I think we should give that a go, shouldn't we? Yeah, we'll give that a go. Okay, so for maximum launch, we need to put the car into its dynamic mode, which is one press of this button here on the wheel. That's done it. The gearbox is in sport. And then you just stomp on the brake and stomp on the throttle and then release the brake. Slightly downhill, straight stretch, a very quiet road I've found here because a little gravity assistance never hurt anyone. Right, here we go. A little lag on take-off, and now we're flying 88 for 100. That's 100, not a 60. You can time it at home. Not sure how fast that was, but for a 2.5-tonne car, that felt completely unnecessary, but utterly, utterly addictive. I'll tell you what, the lack of pitch for a car this big and this high-riding, pitch being the nose rising up when you floor the throttle, the lack of pitch was bloody impressive. And I've got to say, this engine, I'm running a V8 Defender 130 at the moment. That's a supercharged 5.0-litre. This is a twin-turbo. The throttle response, pretty much the same. But once the engines are up and running, this one just has a good deal more wallop. What we need now, really, in an ideal world, is a Ferrari F50. And as luck would have it, if you look out that way... No, I haven't got one. Got confiscated at Customs. Next up is the suspension. Don't worry, we're going to talk about the G.I. Joe tyres in just a minute. It's called 6D Active Air Suspension, essentially height-adjustable air suspension, but now you've got these very fancy hydraulically-linked dampers. It's the same system that you get on the Range Rover Sport SV, similar to the system you get on a McLaren, which is quite outrageous, considering what a lump this thing is. The idea is that it should eliminate pitch and dive and roll on the road, and then when you're off-road, because you don't need anti-roll bars, you get more axle articulation. And if going very fast off-road is your thing, this car has another very special trick up its sleeve. All right, welcome, everyone, to the Octa Arena, which is why I'm wearing this silly-looking helmet. Now, this is an off-road track cut into the sand in this incredible reserve that we got access to here called Bushman's Cloof. Now, my secret sauce here is something called Octa Mode, a long press of this button on the steering wheel and it activates that. That is your sort of fast off-road Baja Mode, if you like, if we're talking Ford Raptors. It sends about 80% of the power to the rear wheels, it loosens off the roll resistance, but keeps the damping high and basically ensures that we should be about to have quite a lot of fun. Here we go. It's a combination of very slow stuff. There's some deep ruts in the sand, so at that point we're just a passenger, really. We're just going to follow the ruts like this corner here, but when it opens up, we'll see if we can get this car to move around a little bit. We got the ESC off and we got the Octa Mode on. There are some ruts and here is a river crossing that I need to crawl across. Otherwise, this would be the world's shortest drive around the Octa Arena. Now, I remember from my briefing that there's a big rock around this corner. There it is. Don't smash into that. And we're off. Well, it is called Octa, supposed to be tough as a diamond. We're about to find out, aren't we? A little touch of the brakes, turn in. A little bit wide there. You can feel it moving around under you. I've just got to trust that this thing is built tough because it feels like utter punishment to a £160,000 luxury car, but look, that's why we're here in South Africa. This is what it's built for. I mean, Land Rover literally designed this track. Okay, so the steering is probably the biggest story for me with the Octa. The ratio on the standard Defender, about 17.5 to 1, I think. Here, it's been reduced right down to 13.5 to 1. So the first thing you notice when you get in this car for the first time is the steering is properly quick. Properly quick. So, yeah, you don't need to be crossing your hands over at all. Gives it a much livelier front end. Gives it a really kind of sporty feeling, which is so bizarre. If you look at the size and the weight of this thing, you've got bigger brakes on this, 400mm front discs. Not that we're using much brakes here. There's a lot of momentum. The sand will slow you down, hopefully, eventually. Right, there's loads of crests out here. It's quite rutted. We're the last of the day to go around this track. You can see it's been given a pretty good workout by the other guys, but it's still good fun. It's good fun to take a Defender, traditionally, that's just good at off-road driving. Slow, conquering all sorts of surfaces slowly and surely. This one's got another gear, hasn't it? And what I'm realising about the Octa is it's about bandwidth. We've done some pretty serious off-road stuff and it copes with it, as you'd expect with a Defender that's on proper advanced all-terrain tyres. It was good on the road. It was good on the road, despite those all-terrain tyres. And now it's got this kind of Baja side to its character, where it can handle a bit of speed and a bit of sideways and a bit of air, if we find an appropriate crest to jump over. It's properly good fun. And then add in to the fact that it looks mean. It's going to look flipping cool wherever you go in this thing, especially the African bush. OK, next up is wheels and tyres, and it's handy, isn't it? When you have one displayed perfectly on the back of the car. You've got three options when it comes to the Defender Octa. You can have 22-inch wheels on all-season tyres with a top speed of 150 miles an hour. Here we've got the 20-inch wheels with the all-terrain tyres. Two types of all-terrain tyres. The intermediate ones, BF Goodrich's 130-mile-an-hour top speed. These are the advanced all-terrain tyres. Land Rover's been referring to them as professional off-road tyres, which is reassuring. Goodyear, DuraTrax, limited top speed to 100 miles an hour. But what we lose in top speed, we should gain in off-road stickiness. This does look like I'm about to drive into a wall. Now, the Defender should do this sort of thing for breakfast. We've got extra ground clearance. We've got even gnarlier tyres. So, I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Time to drive up the wall. Okay. Here we go. Right, nose to the sky. All I can see is big African sky. No idea what's going on. No idea what's going on. Oh, yeah, baby! That probably looked a lot harder than it actually is. But look, this is what the Defender does off-road. There's a lot of computers, there's a lot of software, there's a lot of cleverness going on underneath me to make me look like an off-roading god, and the Octa, well, it's just that little bit better equipped. In fact, I'm so relaxed, I might as well tell you about the interior. It's pretty much standard Defender. You've got these slightly fancy body and sole seats, they call them, because when they play you music, not only do you hear it, you also feel the bass and the vibration through the seats. There's also a bit more bolstering. They're also finished not in leather, but this kind of lovely kind of textile material with this chopped carbon fibre everywhere, which I've seen before. I think there's a bit of a fashion emerging for this chopped carbon fibre. Normally, I think it looks horrible. For some reason, it kind of works in here. God, what's happening to me? Yeah, yeah, that's good ride height. This is, of course, in its silly maximum wading height for the air suspension, but whatever mode you're in, the Octa sits 28 millimetres higher than the standard Defender, and there's a couple of gruelling tasks I can think of to put that to the test. If we encountered a river, we'd probably be able to drive through it without a worry in the world, because the standard Defender has a wading depth of 900 millimetres. Here, we have a full metre. Unfortunately, the riverbed was bone dry, so here's some footage Land Rover grabbed earlier. Where else would a lot of fresh air under the car be handy? Oh, yeah. Okay, so, Octa in the sand dunes. We're here in Lamberts Bay. We are obviously in sand mode. We've got the ESC off, and because I might be that guy, that idiot that gets stuck, there's bound to be someone today, a couple of excuses to start with. These aren't probably the ideal tyres for this exercise. Ideally, what you want is all-season tyres, something with a little bit of slip. What we've got here is the Advanced All-Terrains that we've been running on for the entire trip, so they've got quite stiff sidewalls. But we have aired them down, so we are good to go. And the other thing is the sand here is very fine. Very fine sand, very different to the sand that you find in Dubai, I'm told. Not that I've done much dune bashing in Dubai, but there we go. Now, you might have seen the news that Land Rover are going to enter the Defender into the Dakar Rally. So, this year, January 25, they were support cars. Next year, 2026, there is going to be a works entry, three cars. They're going to be race versions of this, the Defender Octa. So, I can't help feeling that this might be a tryout, you know. They're probably watching me. You never know. You never know. They haven't announced their three drivers yet, so there's a chance. That's all I'm saying. If I don't bin it, I could be in to win it. OK, I'll admit, despite our best efforts, we didn't manage to break the Octa. Conclusion? Yes, it's excess all areas and mostly unnecessary, but as we've proved, this isn't just some Gucci-spec special for showing off around Kensington, although that's inevitably where a lot of them will end up. It's tough as old boots and has more agility and stability than it has any right to, which is in large part down to the boot camp that they put this car through. To tell us a bit more about that, there's one bloke we need to talk to. Matt Becker. Wow. I promised you I wasn't going to play my drum. I did. First of all, thanks for this, but also I've got an apology. So, I tried to break the Octa today. Didn't manage it. I know you like breaking cars. If you break something, then you know how to fix it and improve it, right? So, I just wanted to get that out of the way. Talk about the testing with this car. How is it different from Defender and other models? Because I know you went to the ends of the earth. Yeah, I mean, basically, I'm three years into my journey now at JLR and certainly with the Octa, we went to... To be honest, I hadn't been to Dubai before. That was great. I did it with some of the Range Rover products, but actually to take Octa there as well, we went there with the car, really extreme conditions, but this car will just go anywhere and everywhere. Going to Les Stores, which is a test site down in the south of France, which is a World Rally test site and a Dakar test site. And I must admit, because I've never really done jumps in cars before and some of the engineers... There's nothing to it, is there? Just straight myself in and they're like, no, no, no, keep going, keep going. So, I mean, it's pretty extreme stuff. And as you would have seen today, some of the stuff we've done with the car is pretty extreme, but the test that we did was beyond that. So, the car went there, went to different tyre test facilities like Le Doux in France, which is a Michelin test facility, Nürburgring. The only place I didn't personally go to was Moab for the rock wall stuff. I couldn't fit it in, unfortunately. Matt, you've built your career on tuning the ride and handling for lightweight sports cars at Lotus, GTs and supercars at Aston. What's the difference? How do you tame a two-and-a-half-tonne SUV? Or is it same job, slightly different physics? I think it's a similar job. You're always trying to achieve this. It doesn't matter what car you do, you're always trying to get that level of engagement with the car. And I think the different thing with this car, that perhaps I wasn't used to doing Aston DBX as well, was how much beyond that car, what this car will do in terms of the real extreme off-road, the big jumps and that sort of stuff. So, it's still the same philosophy in terms of what you tune. It's just, as I said, there's new things I've learnt and we never stop learning. There's things that you bolt onto the top of that. And I'm working with the clever engineers at JLR that did it. Did you benchmark? Did you have any sort of rivals along that you... We did, yeah. I probably shouldn't say who they were. But, yeah, we did and, to be honest, we did break them. So, we kind of knew where the level was in terms of... I won't name names because that'd be unprofessional, but, yeah, we did do a lot of benchmarking with this car and we knew how far we wanted to push the extremities of this machine. Right, the suspension, the 6D dynamic air suspension. Yeah, so just clarify what 6D means. Six degrees of freedom. Well, you can explain the whole thing because I've given the headlines to the viewers, but you know it better than anyone. So, six degrees of freedom is forward, back, up, down, left, right. And, basically, the way the 6D suspension works, it has no anti-roll bars. It's hydraulically linked corner to corner. And, effectively, what we can do is we can manage how much pressure we put into the accumulator on each corner, which effectively manages how much roll angle we can have in the car. Having no anti-roll bars allows you to have greater articulation and it removes any torque or friction to allow the wheels to move. You were to witness today, you may not have realised it or not, that when you're driving in grass, gravel, snow or mud and ruts, effectively, what is happening is the comfort valves are fully open, so it's effectively like having no anti-roll bar. And you would feel in the car, you're not getting any of what we call head toss, which is when your head tosses side to side, you wouldn't feel any of that and there's a reason for that because you've effectively taken any resistance of the suspension away. So, effectively, what the 6D suspension does is it's got a massive bandwidth of what the car can do and there's a reason why we took you on road, we took you on fast gravel, we took you on what was called the Optra Arena today, we took you on mud and ruts and rock crawl, to basically show, because every single one of those different modes has a different setting for the suspension, every single one. So, it's like you thought about it. Yeah, we thought about the launch valve, it was pretty rough. But, like, it's almost like a magic technology for you and your role because you're like, what I'd like is something that's softer, more articulation, but, you know, still excellent body control and you're just like suddenly, oh, well, how about this hydraulically linked suspension system? Yeah, because the technology of this gives you a greater bandwidth of what you can do with the car. Because any car you develop, and I've done many of them now, there's always a compromise somewhere and what enables or reduces that compromise is the technology you can use on the car. So, effectively, as I said, I mean, the standard car has a roll gradient, so basically how much it rolls. It's like degrees of roll per one g lateral acceleration. So, the standard car's around six degrees per g. This car in Optimo will be six degrees per g because, effectively, what we want for Optimo, which is for fast gravel, we want the articulation so the car's not getting disturbed, you as a driver's not getting disturbed, but we want the maximum damping because, as you saw today in the Optra Arena, some of those big impacts you're hitting, well, we have to control the wheel as it comes up or goes. Bouncing off them. Otherwise, the wheel just wouldn't have the... So, the dampers basically have a huge range of force available to basically control the wheels. But then on-road comfort, you don't want a car that rolls too much. So, when you put it in performance mode on-road, what kind of roll? So, if you take comfort mode, it's about just over four degrees per g. So, again, it's less than the base car. Dynamic is about just over three degrees per g. And then Opta is just over six degrees per g. So, basically, and with an anti-roll bar system, unless you have an e-arc system on the car, which you can't purely disconnect, then you would have those compromises. And, again, what 6D has allowed us to do is to basically open up bandwidth. And, as I said, there's a reason why we're taking you on all the surfaces we took you on today. Yeah, fantastic. How upset will you be with someone that buys an Opta and just drives it around in the middle of London, showing off? That's got to hurt you deeply. Yeah, I mean, but I think it's the same with any supercar. I mean, I'm sure people that buy 911 GT3s, they're never going to take it to the extreme of the cars are capable of. Yes, we want, you know, all the effort that's gone into this car in terms of what it's capable of doing, and continually capable of doing, is we want people to use the cars in the way it's been developed. But you're going to get people that probably drive over some kerbs, and that's about all they'll ever do. I hope they don't, and I hope people actually get the cars and use them properly. Well, I think they're going to find it's very good at driving over kerbs and pulling up outside the coffee shop. And I can heartily recommend bringing it to South Africa, if that's what you want to do. But there we go. Thank you so much. That's really useful. Are you sure you don't want to go on my bongo? I don't want to go on your bongo. I'm okay. I tried.