Ineos Grenadier Station Wagon

In January 2016 Land Rover stopped building the classic Defender after 67 years, and Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the chemicals magnate behind Ineos, took it personally. He approached Jaguar Land Rover about buying the tooling to keep it in production, and JLR declined. So Ratcliffe built a replacement himself and named it after his favourite pub, The Grenadier in Belgravia, where the idea was hatched. Most pub ideas end with a hangover. This one ended with a factory.

A PUB, A GRUDGE AND A CLEAN SHEET

Ineos announced Ineos Automotive in February 2017 to do the job, and the work ran under the codename Projekt Grenadier. Toby Ecuyer led design, and the brief was unapologetically utilitarian: a box-section steel ladder frame, solid axles at both ends and a shape that looks like it was drawn with a ruler because, functionally, it was. The finished exterior was shown online on 1 July 2020, and nobody needed the press release to see which old Land Rover it was mourning.

Land Rover had tried to trademark the old Defender's shape, and Ineos opposed the applications. The UK Intellectual Property Office refused registration for lack of distinctiveness, and in August 2020 the High Court dismissed JLR's appeal. That cleared the legal road for a square, upright, flat-glassed 4x4 built by somebody else. Ineos had argued the shape didn't work as a 'badge of origin' for JLR, and the courts agreed.

BMW HEART, TRACTOR AXLES, FRENCH ADDRESS

Ineos wasn't going to design an engine from scratch. In March 2019 it signed BMW for powertrains: the 3.0-litre B58 turbo petrol six (282 hp, 332 lb-ft) and the B57 diesel six (245 hp, 406 lb-ft), both through a ZF eight-speed automatic and a Tremec two-speed transfer case with a 2.5:1 low range. Magna Steyr in Austria came on as engineering partner in December 2019, and the program logged a claimed 1.1 million miles of testing, including an outback hot-weather session in early 2022 that got interrupted by a flood.

The axles come from Carraro, an Italian tractor specialist, hung on five-link coil suspension with Eibach springs. Assembly was first planned for a new plant in Bridgend, Wales, announced in September 2019. Then Mercedes put its Smart factory in Hambach, France, up for sale, and in December 2020 Ineos bought it, along with a recently upgraded paint shop and a workforce that had been building Smarts since 1998. The steel floor and shell get 4,068 spot welds, and the body meets the frame in an eight-bolt drop.

WHAT YOU ACTUALLY GET

Specs read like an overlander's wish list: 264 mm of ground clearance, 800 mm wading depth, 3,500 kg (about 7,700 lb) braked towing, permanent four-wheel drive with a lockable centre diff, and front and rear lockers via the Rough Pack, standard on the Trialmaster. Inside, the diff locks and off-road switches live in an aircraft-style overhead panel, there's a low-volume 'toot' horn for cyclists, and the rotary controller is BMW iDrive in work boots.

The catch is the steering. Up to the 2025 model year the Grenadier uses a Bosch hydraulically assisted recirculating-ball box with almost four turns lock to lock, and testers complained about vagueness and wander on the road. Ineos redid it for 2026 with a new variable-ratio worm gear, more assist as you turn, and a hydraulic stop at full lock. If the G 500 is the boxy 4x4 that went to the opera, the Grenadier is the one that stayed behind to fix the fence, and the 2026 truck finally does it without a workout.

SO FAR, SO SQUARE

Series production began at Hambach in late 2022, with first deliveries that December. US buyers got the petrol B58 only, from $71,500, with US-spec trucks leaving France in September 2023. Then the growing pains. NHTSA recalls covered auxiliary-switch wiring that could short (a fire risk), steering ball-joint nuts that needed to be locking ones, and door buttons short on grease that could let a door open on the move. In September 2024 a parts shortage linked to the insolvency of supplier Recaro Automotive stopped the line until January 2025.

Production figures cited on Wikipedia put output at 4,553 Grenadiers in 2023 and about 8,000 in 2024, well short of the 25,000 a year Ineos said the plant could build at full capacity. The Quartermaster pickup joined in late 2023. Owners on the forums report software and electrical gremlins alongside real affection for the thing. It is the closest thing on sale to a new classic Defender with a warranty, and it has the quirks to prove it.