2022 Land Rover Defender 90 Long Term Review Car News

But the contradictions are clear, and we might as well bring them out. It’s a £65,000 car that might not entirely suit a city family lifestyle.

It has, for example, a Volkswagen Golf-like 397-litre trunk that requires you to have the dexterity of a bomb disposal expert if you want to balance anything inside without it falling out when you open the back.

Land Rover is so safe you’ll be using the rear seats to haul stuff rather than people if you opt for the Country Pack that it installs a heavy metal divider behind the front seats, which I’ve now had to remove as a result to have children. Access to these rear seats is difficult, requiring you to pull yourself up, move around, and then, if no one is in the front passenger seat, push yourself a body length forward to be able to close the wide door.

And, while highlighting that space front and rear is generous, there’s also the fact that those compromises are crammed into a 4.5m long car with the spare wheel (already used ) considered, 2 m wide, a length that makes it hard to park anywhere and a height that makes access to many car parks dangerous.

And yet… after a week of thinking the world had gone crazy and I could never live with it, something clicked. One moment my brain was flooded with negatives (a list you could add with Land Rover’s age-old characteristic of hesitant start and slightly vague steering, maybe not helped by the knobby tyres), the next I was wondered how I could ever live without her. I’ve been through this before, including with a Range Rover, and it’s easy to explain but hard to understand. These are cars that just click; suddenly you know your path, know and anticipate its weaknesses; and then, like that, your right elbow rests on the door frame, you steer with one hand and you’d be devastated if it were taken away from you.