Celebrate World Land Rover Day with These New 2020 Land Rover Defender Images
Land Rover has released a bunch of new photos of the upcoming 2020 Defender SUV to celebrate World Land Rover Day.
April 30 marks the anniversary of the first Land Rover's debut in 1948.
The new Defender has already covered almost 750,000 testing miles ahead of its debut later this year.
Every year, World Land Rover Day is celebrated on April 30, commemorating the first Land Rover's debut at the Amsterdam auto show on April 30, 1948. To go along with the celebrations, Land Rover has released a bunch of new images of camouflaged 2020 Defender prototypes undergoing testing all over the world and has given updates on the upcoming SUV's rigorous testing regime.
As part of the testing, Land Rover is putting a new Defender through its paces at the Borana Conservancy in Kenya as part of the brand's 15-year partnership with Tusk Trust, a British charity for wildlife conservation. A special prototype with a Tusk-themed camo pattern will go through "a series of real-world trials" at the 35,000-acre nature reserve, including towing heavy loads and carrying cargo across "unforgiving terrain." That prototype, shown below, is our best look yet at the new Defender, featuring a tight camo wrap but no fake body panels like those found on all the other Defenders you see in these images. We can see a rounded hood and roof, smooth shoulders with a crisp character line, and some additional details not visible on other prototypes.
In addition to the Tusk testing announcement and new photos of the Defender in different locales, Land Rover has given new details about the testing that Defender prototypes have been going through all across the world. Land Rover says the Defender has been driven nearly 750,000 miles in real-world testing so far and that, by the time it debuts, the SUV will have "passed more than 45,000 individual tests." It has been subjected to conditions from sub-40-degree cold in the Arctic to 122-degree heat in the desert, and it has been tested at altitudes of 10,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains. Land Rover also says the Defender has gone through development on sand dunes in Dubai, rocky trails in Moab, muddy roads in the U.K., and at the Nürburgring racetrack in Germany-yes, seriously.
In contrast to the Defender's globe-circling testing program, all of the design and development work has been done out of Land Rover's Gaydon facilities in England. Land Rover says that the Defender will be built at a new plant in Nitra, Slovakia, and we previously learned that it would be revealed at some point in 2019 before going on sale in the United States in 2020. Beyond knowing that it will ride on a unibody platform and come with either two or four doors, we don't have many concrete details on the new Defender, but Land Rover says it will be "the toughest and most capable Land Rover vehicle ever made." As it should be.
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