Jaguar Land Rover seek to scupper the 'Land Rover Defender' plans by Ineos

Land Rover are trying to stop Jim Ratcliffe’s (pictured with a Defender) Ineos using the Defender design

Jaguar Land Rover are seeking to trademark the Land Rover Defender – and Land Rover Series – shape in an attempt to thwart the plans of Ineos.

When we revealed the plans by Jim Ratcliffe – billionaire boss of Ineos – to build a new Land Rover Defender now Land Rover has finally put it out to pasture, we did wonder how it would pan out.

We couldn’t see JLR being willing to sell off the rights and tooling for the Defender – especially as they have a very healthy Classic Defender business model – so Jim would have to start from scratch.

Fast forward to this week, and Jim Radcliffe has been out and about telling the world his plans are well advanced and he’s going to stump up £600 million to make it happen, and deliver up to 10,000 new jobs in the process.

So we assumed that the plan is to start from scratch, build new tooling and make the ‘New’ Defender look like the original but with a build quality Land Rover never managed.

But its seems Jaguar Land Rover isn’t impressed.

Despite us wondering last year how JLR would manage to trademark the design of the Defender from the very first Series cars right up to the run-out Defenders, it seems that’s exactly what they’re doing, and actually filed applications in 2016 according to the The Times (subscription required).

It seems Radcliffe’s Ineos has filed objections to the trademark plans by JLR.

It’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out.