Ineos Grenadier

All-new but old-school off-road workhorse presents itself for long-awaited scrutiny Homage. Pastiche. Copy. Call it what you will, but at a time when the automotive rulebook is being so comprehensively rewritten, it’s refreshing to climb – nay, clamber, given the substantial heave up into the seat – into a vehicle that seeks to do absolutely nothing new and is, as a result, so different from almost everything else on sale today.A ladder frame, six-cylinder engines, beam axles, recirculating ball steering... The list goes on. The Ineos Grenadier is a wilful throwback, even for fans of the determinedly old-school Jeep Wrangler or Toyota Land Cruiser. It has a singularity of purpose that is perhaps unrivalled in the modern era,in which all cars strive to do more rather than less. The Grenadier’s goal? To be the best off-roader there is or, to use the popular shorthand, to be the new (old) Land Rover Defender.Alas, that last line can never be just a throwaway for the Grenadier. From the moment its creation became public knowledge, it was both blessed and cursed as a car precious few will own but about which everyone will have an opinion – a position supercharged by the collapse of talks to acquire the (old) Defender’s tooling and the subsequent legal challenges from Land Rover to stop its undoubtedly evocative styling ever seeing the light of day again.But here it is, in shape as much Mercedes G-Wagen as it is British icon, perhaps even with a hint of Land Cruiser at the rear and, frankly, with enough of a backstory – and budget, given the admission that the bill to date for the Ineos Automotive project is around £1.3 billion – to be given a chance to stand on its own merits. A fable it may be (see p10), but who among the automotive industry and enthusiast community wouldn’t be drawn to find out what a car supposedly dreamed up by a few billionaire pals down the pub (from which the model takes its name) is like?Busy. Sturdy. Practical. Comfortable. But compromised. Initially, then, prepare to have your eyes overwhelmed: forward of the centre console storage bin there are cupholders, a dial and six buttons to control the infotainment and a sat-nav screen, the gear lever, the high- and low-range selector, a phone holder and then, up onto the vertical part of the dashboard, a further 13 buttons across three rows (assuming you opt for heated seats – it’s not all ancient history in here), plus two air vents that bookend a compass.Then there’s the touchscreen and, neck now craned, eyes on stalks, an array of another 21 roof-mounted switches, including the diff locks, mercifully highlighted by protruding chrome extensions lest you need to deploy their assistance in a hurry. Don’t panic – it’s more cartoonish than cluttered. Time is your friend here. While some of the switchgear feels somewhat lightweight to the touch, it is all designed to be used by hands encased in gloves. It’s chunky, purposeful and well-signposted, and your scrambled brain soon recognises order within the chaos.The sat-nav may be third-party, but its operation is straightforward and intuitive, either from the centre console or the touchscreen. Throughout two days at the wheel, only the engagement of the diff locks presented a challenge: the system is easily confused by inaccurate pokes, while the user is easily confused by the fact that the lights that illuminate to show they are engaged are hidden beneath the finger pushing them. A dial or switch might have been simpler, but once you go about things the right way, they work. What doesn’t improve with time are the offset pedals. On the upside the seat is super-comfortable, your position adjustable (it even has a telescopic steering wheel) and – praise be – you can rest your right elbow on the window ledge. But there’s no escaping that in right-hand-drive form, much of this modernity is undone by the protrusion of the exhaust manifold into the footwell. Disguised as the world’s widest footrest it may be, and surely big enough for a pair of size 16s, but as a result, the brake pedal doesn’t start until beyond the centre point of the steering wheel. On first acquaintance, you half- wonder if you need to make use of that dashboard compass to send an expedition out east to discover the accelerator. Lord knows, the old Defender had quirks, but the fact that left-hookers have none of these compromises tests your loyalty as much as it does your flexibility.It’s a pity, because it’s a bit of a bodge in an interior that otherwise belies none of Ineos’s ‘new kid on the block’ status. It’s comfortable and practical, if perhaps short on a bit of space for the driver to stow stuff because of all those buttons, but otherwise extremely spacious. Likewise, passengers get a good deal; even tall adults will fit in the back, and there’s a surfeit of USBs in another nod to modernity. The boot – accessed by a split tailgate that shows a concession to practicality that other cars bearing a chunky spare wheel and side hinges could learn from – is capacious. It’s measured at up to 2000 litres, but perhaps more importantly its width, depth and square sides mean you can fit enough hay bales in there to keep the horse happy.One more negative, so we can complete the list of right-hook gripes and move on: the windscreen wipers – whose ability to clear the whole window was questionable at times during our runs in grotty weather anyway – aren’t converted either, leaving you to watch as a thick layer of grime builds up down the right-hand edge of the screen. Add in a chunky A-pillar and you have a blindspot of almost absurd proportions.If you’re generous enough to apply a cost versus reward justification to the pedal position, it’s probably the only negative on the Grenadier I couldn’t forgive, and while it’s a niche issue dictated by the weather, whatever the cost would have been to re-engineer the wipers to work both ways, it would surely have been worth it. In a car laden with clever touches, such as the sympathetically gentle ‘toot’ horn to warn pedestrians, cyclists or horse riders of your presence, this is a surprisingly amateurish oversight.Frantic. Infuriating. Refined. Unstoppable. That mix of the sublime and ridiculous continues on the move. While some compromises are self-inflicted, others are perhaps unavoidable. On the road, to anyone who hasn’t been driving an old Defender or G-Wagen for the past decade, the Grenadier’s steering is a shock. The car’s off-road bias, complemented here by chunky all-terrain tyres, combines with the steering set-up to provide a continuous workout as you see-saw at the wheel to keep everything pointing the right way no matter how smooth the surface. It’s initially quite alarming, but while you do get used to it, there’s no hiding from the fact that the quest for lightness (boosted by hydraulic power steering) and steering feel off-road comes at a price on it.That it doesn’t self-centre in a hurry and is 3.85 turns from lock to lock is another facet that requires you to reset your expectations and calls for a level of serious caution at least during your early miles. Again, these watch-outs are only amplified by the fact that the Grenadier rides and handles with perhaps more poise than its vital statistics suggest it should ever be able to.Given its rudimentary construction, it grips without excessive roll and understeers benignly if you do go in too fast, all the while soaking up whatever road craters have emerged this winter. Don’t read that as a suggestion that there is any depth of dynamic poise – we’re talking a ladder frame and 2.8 tonnes here – but a smooth hurry along an A-road is the sort of challenge that leaves you satisfied that you tried. The depth of sophistication is highlighted in more mundane areas, too, in particular for how little wind noise is whipped off the boxy shape. All you really hear is the transfer box’s constant if distant whine.This is all complemented by the silky smoothness of both of the BMW-sourced six-cylinder engines, one petrol, one diesel. Linked to the eight-speed ZF gearbox, the petrol makes 332lb ft and the diesel 406lb ft. They are a joy, and while common sense is likely to point you at the diesel’s still mildly alarming real-world 22mpg and better low-down pull, both engines deliver lavish, controllable propulsion across the revs. There is, however, something quite alluring about the petrol, providing you can live with 15mpg as an everyday metric.And so to the crucial, final part of the jigsaw: what is it like off-road? Alas, I can give only a qualified answer: on the trickiest path I tried – an uphill climb on muddy sludge – I messed up the diff locks and still got to the top. Spectacular though the route was, finding the muscle to engage the stiff low-range selector was probably tougher than the path. Instead, I’ll have to refer you to a colleague who drove it elsewhere a few days later, on slopes in the ice and snow.It was, he said, “incredible”, echoing Greg Kable’s earlier drive in a prototype in a quarry, in which he concluded it was “virtually unbeatable in low range off-road”. As a reminder, the Grenadier’s development included it taking a beating on the brutal Schöckl pass in Austria until it demonstrated greater durability than the G-Wagen. It’ll take a group test to provide more reassurance, but so far there’s no reason to disbelieve the claims that it is a match for anything out there. Given the car’s goals, that’s a huge tick.The Grenadier is a car of extremes, then: uncompromising but compromised. Brilliant off-road and brilliant for the most part in its execution but a bit of a handful on the road and flawed by a collection of detailed miscues mostly inflicted only on right-hand-drive customers. Judged as a first car from a new brand, albeit with a roster of top-notch suppliers and a seasoned team from Magna Steyr, it’s remarkable for how it achieves so much of what it set out to do.Ineos set out to build an imperious off-roader with character, and for the most part it has done just that. That in itself is an enormous triumph. Today’s Grenadier is certainly good enough to stand on its own merits and sit on any shortlist against even the best of its competition. Given the timescales and challenges, it’s an incredible achievement.The enduring frustration, though, is the inescapable hunch that this could have been a truly breathtaking car. Consider how far Ineos has come so quickly, and how perfect some aspects of the Grenadier are, and the shortcomings are as magnified as the potential. It’s not a homage, pastiche or copy, but maybe in that respect, it’s still a bit too early to do away with those old Defender comparisons just yet.