An A for Land Rover Defender X

WHEN it comes to diesel engines, I find it particularly challenging to get excited. There’s that unrefined oilburner clatter on cold start-ups that reminds me of a farm tractor and that horrendous turbo lag that you get from a standstill that just diminishes the driving experience no matter how luxurious a vehicle may be on the inside.

Over the past decade, however, I will admit that diesel engines have improved and that one manufacturer – BMW – has nailed the diesel engine in its passenger cars and SUVs. These days there’s nothing that comes close to an in-line six-cylinder BMW diesel engine, regardless of whether it has one, two or three turbochargers attached to it. There’s refinement to BMW six-pot oil-burners. These engines idle smoothly and pick up torque with very little input lag and depending on their individual state of tune, can either be blisteringly quick or sensationally frugal and sometimes both –as is the case with the BMW 330d as an example. BMW, however, has a challenger for the throne when it comes to diesel engine supremacy and this is thanks to Land Rover's latest diesel six-pot engine, which we put to the test in the latest Defender 110.

Priced at a cool R1 679 352 in D300 X guise, the latest Defender 110 packs a 3.0-litre straight-six turbocharged diesel engine that punches out 221kW at 4 000rpm and 650Nm from as low as 1 500rpm. Grunt is sent to all four wheels via an eight-speed torque converter style automatic gearbox (one of the best shifters in an SUV right now) and you can tailor your traction capabilities through Land Rover’s Terrain Response system depending on your driving surface. The engine fires up with an almost petrol-like smoothness and while there is some clatter when it’s cold, that fades away quickly and from the inside of the cabin, you can barely hear it idle.

It's this blend of smoothness and then the punch that it delivers that boggles the mind in the latest Defender because the vehicle can gallop from a standstill to 100km/h in just seven seconds and on to a top speed of 190km/h. It’s this kind of urgency that makes it a fantastic diesel engine, particularly in a near 2.5-ton behemoth of an SUV. In the past, you'd get this kind of pace from BMW’s X5, but you don’t expect it in a Defender of all things.

It’s frugal too, with the test car returning 11.5l/100km after a week of town and highway driving. Land Rover claims it will sip a little as 7.6l/100km in a combined cycle, which I do find optimistic, but there's no doubt that you can achieve this figure on a long highway sojourn.

I didn't expect to enjoy driving the Defender 110 as much as I did. It proved exceptionally capable as a daily runaround and although it’s large and cumbersome at times, the range of camera systems and technologies available in the vehicle make it quite easy to drive.

I find it bittersweet, however, that Land Rover (and Jaguar) has reached this pinnacle of performance with its diesel (and petrol) engines, which will slowly start to disappear from 2025 as electrification takes over.

Defender prices start at R1 141 966 for the D240 short-wheelbase 90 variant and extend all the way to R2 439 310 for the fire-breathing 110 V8 Carpathian Edition.