Octa is the magic number

Let me preface this with me admitting that I've grown to like the modern Defender more and more over the old Defender. I know, blasphemy, but I'm also allowed to have my own opinions and you're not allowed to shoot me, so what are you going to do about it? Come at me, bro!

Now, on to the main subject I wanted to talk to you about, my dear reader, which is the Land Rover Defender Octa and my undying and growing love for it. I came to realize that I needed to be admitted to the psych ward only just recently, when a friend of mine had an Octa under his arse for a week and didn't come over to boast about it to my face. Now that we aren't friends anymore, the hurt of not getting to drive the Octa, burned a bit deeper than I thought it would.

I came to the conclusion that this weird not so little machine is just the amount of insanity I need and want in my life. I know that putting a 635 hp 4.4 liter V8 in the Defender makes no sense at all. Maybe if you put it to work at the Dakar Rally, but since that race doesn't make sense either, we're not getting anymore sensible. I mean, this thing has no use for such insane amounts of horsepower. It's built for off road purposes, which means it needs torque, not horsepower. To go into the mud and get out you need to be able to spin wheels and move weight in the roughest of conditions (or 635 real horses bolted to the front of the Defender, pulling it out of the bog), not power to go fast.

But somehow this unsanity (yes, I made this word up) and frankly stupid combination makes perfect sense in my mind. To me adding a V8 to a fragile British off-road car seems like just the right thing to do. I think by doing this you make the Defender better than the sum of its parts. Or in other words: I feel like an inline six diesel, which makes a Defender the off road beast it is, is not making it the fun machine it could be. I should know, I've driven the six cilinder ones multiple times. Those Defenders are made for purpose and excel at it. But that also makes them a bit boring, either on or off the tarmac.

I like my on- and off roading to be a bit more eventful. That might be the reason I didn't pass the off roading course I took. Turns out getting to the other side of the track as quickly as possible wasn't the goal. The goal was getting there as efficiently as possible and let the car do what it's good at. I took it as: I have a Defender, I know what it can do, I know what I can do and I know what it takes to get to the finish line, let's have some fun while I'm at it. The term "POWERRRRRRRRRR" comes to mind.

And with that term needs to come a nice soundtrack only a V8 can provide. More importantly only a British V8 can do so. I want my cars to make a dirty, low and sludgy sound. A sound that makes you doubt if the engine is trying to rattle itself to pieces. Which it probably does, since it's a product from JLR.

There is however a small issue with the Octa. Just a teeny tiny one. The price. Where I live I need to shell out 300.000 euro's to get one. Which is cheap if you plan to use the car as you home aswel. If that is not an option, the hefty price tag is a bit of a party pooper.

But there might be hope for me just yet. I could also go for the little less unhinged Defender 90 with a 550 hp V8. Smaller car, but also smaller horsepower, should be fine right? The price is also a bit smaller at a bit over 261.000 euro's. You can't even buy a house for that money anymore, so it's the steal of the century.

Or I could just wait it out a bit longer and wait for the depreciation to kick in like a mule. JLR products are getting hit hard by this economic force. So In a year or two I might be able to pick one up for a tenner or something. Fingers crossed.

Or maybe I should go for the 'baby' Defender that is in development at JLR right now. It's supposed to be the cheapest and cutest of all the Defenders that have ever existed. Which to me sounds like it's going to be something like a Mini Cooper on steroids. In my mind the people at JLR should also consider giving it a V8. I know they're not even thinking about it, but just look at the Aston Martin Cygnet with a V8 under its tiny bonnet. That also didn't make sense, but it has made history. To do that, you have to bit a bit insane, right?

In other news:

Talking about cilinders, you know which car has way too few of them? The Mercedes-AMG C63S E. It has only four. In a super sedan. That is just regular insanity, not the fun one. And while Mercedes was having trouble convincing people to pay way to much money for a car that sounds like ass, Audi was paying attention and noted this mistake down in the "do not do" column during the development of the RS5. The top brass aparently knew that customers wouldn't be ready to even consider anything less than six cilinders in the RS5.

A fun little innovation coming from the Finnish tire brand Nokian: retractable spikes. Yes, that means a hit and run has an even higher chance of killing the target than before, without losing grip on the get away. But in all seriousness the Hakkapeliitta 01 tire will have retractable studs to make driving on tarmac a bit more comfortable while also having the option to use the metal studs for extra grip when the going gets (d)icey.

You know this day was coming, but Elon Musk didn't. Toyota and Stellantis, two of the biggest car manufacturers worldwide, are no longer buying CO2-credits from Tesla. That means that Musk has to find billions elsewhere to artificially inflate the quarterly figures. Things are looking very rough for Musk. The Cybercab and Optimus aren't going to help sales for years, so that pay package of a more than a billion is looking to go poof in a cloud of CO2.