The Old Land Rover Defender Might Come Back! Here’s One Man’s Plan To Resurrect The Old Beast.

The Land Rover Defender is one of the most legendary off road vehicles of all time. Any other line of thinking when one hears “Defender” in the automotive context is just plain wrong. This old war horse has gone into battle, crossed deserts, and helped humanity forge onward into the wilderness for decades.

Sadly, the old LRD was finally put to rest as the last one rolled off the assembly line at the end of January. Land Rover is currently redesigning the mainstay in it’s lineup and if the new one is even half as good and capable as the old one, that’ll be a win. But the nostalgia for the original LRD hasn’t waned in the slightest. So much so that one British billionaire wants them to come back in a big way, and he’s going to do it himself.

Road & Track reports:

Jim Ratcliffe, the founder of a successful chemical company called Ineos, is in talks with Jaguar-Land Rover to revive the Defender. It’s still unclear how Ratcliffe would go about bringing back the legendary off-roader—whether he would buy the intellectual property, the factory tooling, or both.

It’s also unclear how Ratcliffe would get around the engineering challenges that finally made Land Rover undertake a full redesign of the staunchly traditional Defender after so long: Emissions and fuel economy regulations, neither of which are kind to the 12-mpg barn-shaped 4×4.