Land Rover Defender
The Octa Lost Its Only Fair Fight
Three solo reviews celebrate £160,000 of consolidation. Carwow stages it against a tuned £100,000 Grenadier and a tuned £60,000 Ranger Raptor. The Octa places second.
Four cameras met the 2026 Defender Octa this month. Three of them met it alone — on a Pacific Northwest back road, on the campus of a Kentucky mall, on a controlled launch trail in Colorado — and three of them came back impressed. The fourth lined the Octa up next to a tuned Inos Grenadier and a tuned Ford Ranger Raptor, and graded the result. Inos thirteen, Octa twelve, Ford nine.
The Consolidate Pitch
For Roads Untraveled, the Octa is consolidation logic — one vehicle replacing the M5+Defender two-car garage that gas prices and 5,400-lb hybrid M5s have made absurd. He invokes the 911 Dakar and the Lamborghini Sterrato as precedent, marvels at how the 6D suspension makes a near-6,000-lb truck "behave like a much smaller vehicle," and accepts the consolidate pitch on its own terms. The pitch survives uncontested because nothing on his back road forces it to break.
The Collector's Frame
ShootingCars's Zach Pradel drives it around a Kentucky mall campus. He calls it "a silly automobile," notes the BMW twin-turbo doesn't deliver "the gut punch" of a Raptor R, and admits he'd let his elderly grandmother drive it. From this evidence, the conclusion: "I think this is a future classic. This is a moment in time for Land Rover." The collector's frame doesn't require a road test — it requires gratuity. Land Rover built a car nobody asked for. That is the argument.
The Buzzkill
TheTopher, who filmed the panel's most thorough on-road impressions, is the one solo voice that finds something to dislike. The 6D suspension is "sublime"; the BMW V8 is fine. But the stability control "is way too intrusive" — even with traction switched off, "there's a ton of intervention" — and the only other vehicle in the class he's driven with this much nannying is the Cadillac Escalade. "Bit of a buzzkill if I'm being honest."
The Hillside
Carwow's Mat Watson is the only reviewer who put the Octa in front of equals. He brought a tuned £100,000 Inos Grenadier driven by a professional off-road driver, and a tuned £60,000 Ford Ranger Raptor on aftermarket tires — combined, the rivals cost what one Octa costs. Six challenges: drag races, maneuverability, steps, rock crawl, hill start. The Octa won the hill start, the test most rewarding electronic finesse, and walked the steps with road tires on — "effortless," in Watson's word. It lost both drag races to the lifted Raptor. It tied the rock crawl. Final tally: Inos 13, Octa 12, Ranger 9. The £160,000 halo SUV finished a point behind a £100,000 modded Grenadier.
Mathematically, my brain is just this does not compute. This shouldn't work.
Land Rover has no real reason to build this. No one's specifically asking for this.
Supercar levels of capability, but it's completely hampered by its traction and stability control system.
In second place, it's actually the Land Rover Defender with 12 points. But the winner is the Inos Grenadier on 13 points.
The reviewers, side by side
4 reviewers. 2 questions. Where the arguments overlap and where they diverge.
Wins Where Electronics Referee
Read Carwow's scorecard backward. The Octa's biggest single win was the hill start — the challenge rewarding electronic finesse. It tied the rock crawl, where a center diff and a pro driver were enough. It lost both drag races to lifted hardware on aftermarket tires. The Octa is a magnificent piece of software wearing very expensive metal. It wins the showroom and the launch trail. It places second the moment a £100,000 rival shows up with a driver who knows what to do.
Choose the road, the Octa wins. Choose the rivals, it doesn't.