Six months ago, Land Rover ended production of its iconic Defender, a truck whose roots go all the way back to 1948. But now, The Sunday Times reports that a British business person is in talks with Jaguar Land Rover to bring back the off-road beast from the dead.
Please don’t be toying with our emotions; we need this.
We were sad when Jaguar Land Rover had to shut down the assembly line in Solihull, England after 68 years, due to the Defender’s inability to meet strict emissions requirements. But now we have hope.
The site says that Jim Ratcliffe, a chemical engineer turned businessman—and CEO of a $4.2 billion chemical company called Ineos—has been talking with executives from Jaguar Land Rover in an attempted to bring the legendary Defender back into production on British soil.
We don’t know if Ratcliffe is buying the actual tooling to build the current Defender, or if he’s just buying intellectual property. Heck, we don’t really know much at all about Ratcliffe’s plans, if we’re honest. But either way, many peoples’ hopes and dreams rest on his shoulders.
(By “many people” we mean us. It is all us.)