Best replacement for Defender should be Defender, says JLR as it courts MOD deal
The MOD is looking to replace its fleet of Land Rovers, with Jaguar Land Rover insisting it should win the contract – and showing the Army what it has to offer.
Both the MOD's Land Rover and Pinzgauer fleets will be replaced under the Light Mobility Vehicle programme, with JLR one of several companies hoping to secure the deal.
Three new Wolf Series II variants were on display at the British Army DVD 2026 event at Millbrook proving ground – a Tactical Mobility Vehicle, Mono Tactical Mobility Vehicle and a Utility Vehicle.
Multi-choice
JLR said these were the first of many variants of Defender Wolf Series II to come, with the Armed Forces firmly in mind.
Stephen Webb, a former Army officer and the director of JLR's defence division, was asked why he believed the contract should go to his company.
"We were really keen that the best replacement for Defender should be Defender," he told BFBS Forces News.
"And the vehicle that you see here, the core of that vehicle, is one that at its DNA has got all the capabilities that the military would need.
"So off-road, it's supreme off-road. There is no better vehicle on the market for that. And also it's flexibility."
Mr Webb added: "This is one variant. There are five other core variants or body shapes that you can get. And there are 26 other variants that will fall from that.
"So we think we've got the core capability and the flexibility to give the Army what it needs."
A soldier's perspective
Mr Webb, who served on operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan, was asked why he thought soldiers would want to drive JLR's new offerings.
"I was an armoured infantry company commander in Iraq, and then I was a battle group commander in Afghanistan," he explained.
"And what Iraq taught me was it's all about vehicle availability. And so your availability needs to be as high as it can possibly be.
"We did 62,000 tests – over 62,000 tests on this [the Defender Wolf Series II] before we brought it into service, before we started selling it in 2020.
"And we've also developed this vehicle into the Dakar winner – and that's off this core vehicle with the robustness and the reliability that it has.
"One lesson we learned from Dakar that we're then building into this vehicle is in the centre we've got a box there, and that's what we're calling the simplified electronic architecture.
"And we've taken the key ECUs that you need to drive and operate, and rather than leaving them dispersed around the vehicle as they would be for a civilian vehicle, we've grouped them together there.
"That makes it much easier for diagnostics and also, more importantly, for predictive maintenance. So we can predict if there's going to be an issue with those and so we can replace them before there's a failure.
"And that's the benefit of that sort of thing that we've built onto the core car that we believe we've already tested significantly and to its limits."
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