Ineos Grenadier and Jim Ratcliffe winter testing
The Ineos Grenadier, a modern interpretation of the original Land Rover Defender, will not now go in to production until 2022.
It’s almost five years since we revealed plans by Ineos to recreate the Land Rover Defender for the 21st century, just as Land Rover ended production of the original Defender.
Since then, we’ve had Land Rover try to block the Ineos plans (and fail), plans to build the Ineos Grenadier in Wales (and fail) and the revelation that the Grenadier will be powered by BMW. And much more.
But through all these ups and downs, Ineos has moved forward and the Grenadier is, or was, supposed to be ready to go in to production at the old Smart factory in France this summer. But it isn’t.
Clearly the Covid situation in 2020 has made proper testing more difficult for Ineos, and as they sign-off winter testing of the Grenadier in the Austrian Schöckl mountain (where Mercedes test the G-Wagen) it’s revealed that the Grenadier won’t now go in to production until July 2022.
Dirk Heilmann, Ineos CEO, said:
Reaching this important development milestone is a great step forward for the project. We only have one opportunity to get this right and our quality and performance targets for the Grenadier remain paramount. We won’t cut corners. After today’s very positive results we are on track to reach our targets and to allow the start of production in July next year at the latest.
The Ineos Grenadier prototypes – 130 of them – will clock up 1.2 million miles of testing and are now off for hot weather stuff in Death Valley and the Middle East.
Peter Szczesiak says
Given that the Land Rover Defender had to stop production due to lack of pedestrian safety why should this blatant copy be allowed on the road at all? Also it’s another dirty diesel which borrows its engines from companies that are currently getting sued for emissions breaches! It’s new so ideally it’s an opportunity to be a clean product rather than a major polluter