1. Defender Chassis

Until 2009, Defender chassis' were still partly welded by hand at the Land Rover factory. Land Rover approached GKN to speed up this manual build stage. In January 2009, they started work on the automation process of the chassis build. The result was a 60% reduction of used floor space at Land Rover and massive savings on utilities. The chassis' are now fully welded by robots.

2. Convertible Defender

No, we don't mean a canvas top. You can buy an actual convertible Defender from Vantage Field, a custom vehicle builder based in London. Amongst stretched Vogues and a 6x6 Range Rover Sport, they produce this interesting 110...

More info at Vantage Field

3. Most Expensive Land Rover Defenders

Factory: Autobiography £61,845.00, currently the most expensive Defender sold by LR.

Carisma Auto Design: £80,000 (Carisma Autos were behind the 3 series spectacular, Pimp My Ride UK on MTV).

Kahn Long Nose Huntsman 6x6: £199,875.00!!!!

Studio Job: £750,000

4. Fastest Known Defender

The fastest Land Rover Defender title is hotly contested between a lot of tuning companies. One way to judge this is through competition. It's the only time (we know of) that a series of modified Defenders have been pitted against each other in one event. Out of 27 vehicles, this  Twisted Performance TD5 with 239BHP and Porsche Cayenne Tyres took the honours.

Kahn design claim that the '105 Flying Huntsman Longnose' Defender is "faster" than it's rivals. It sports 550bhp and lashings of torque from it's 6.2-litre LS3 V8.

5. Build Process

There are 500 workers on the Defenders mostly manual assembly line. Each one takes 3 days to make and there are only 7 robots on the entire Defender build line, by comparison, 328 robots are used to build a Range Rover. There are 100 Defenders produced each day, as opposed to the 1000 Jaguar XE daily output. A Defender is made of 8900 individual parts.

6. Shared Parts with Series 1

Despite many media outlets and dealers claiming that the Defender has been built 'since 1948', the Defender, in fact, only shares 2 common parts with the Series One.

Part Number: AFC710010 - Land Rover Defender & Series Underfloor Support Strut

Part number:  301328 - Canvas Hood Rope Hooks

7. Appeared in 885 Films & TV Programs

The Defender has appeared in more films and TV programs than any other person on the planet. It should have it's own Hollywood 'Walk of fame' star. Amongst it's appearances include the last 3 Bond films (most memorably in Skyfall) and will be playing a role in the 2015 epic, "Spectre".

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