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Professional driver Sean Gorman knows his way around a car. He’s an engineer at heart, consulting on car increase and the usage of his ride as an instructor on military off-road using and survival in addition to his career as a professional adventurer. This time, he’s within the back of the wheel of a unusual Land Rover Defender Octa, teaching drivers how to catch air.
Whereas the Defender has made a name for itself as a high-tail-anywhere four-by-four, it’s never been engineered relatively like this. Equipped with a unusual mode activated with an now not potential-to-miss button on the steering wheel, the Defender Octa is extra capable of tricks its lesser trims cannot fathom.
Love defying gravity.
“Yumps” on demand
Land Rover’s storied Defender nameplate, introduced to lifestyles in 1990, is identified as an off-road beast with British refinement. Queen Elizabeth II was a fan of the Defender, and the SUV was featured prominently in a chase scene within the James Bond movie No Time to Die. After a four-year hiatus, the brand introduced the Defender back to lifestyles with a whole unusual physique style in 2020, and it has continued to are residing up to its legacy.
That’s extra moral than ever for the Octa variant, which Land Rover says is essentially the most highly effective Defender it has ever made. The SUV transforms into a excessive-performance, low-friction machine when its eponymous terrain response is chosen. Activate the mode, and salvage ready to soar. Or, extra accurately, “yump”–a motorsports term describing the second when a car leaves the bottom temporarily after encountering a crest within the road at excessive pace.
“Now not all people needs this considerable functionality,” Gorman says after exhibiting off the Defender’s abilities on a grime track. “But if you achieve, the Octa brings it.”
Jumping over a ridge is now not handiest that you can mediate of, but comfortable with a hydraulic suspension arrangement. Image: Land Rover
Decided, there are heaps of automobiles on the road that can yump on demand, but that doesn’t mean they’re all going to offer a comfortable landing. Loaded up with an lustrous suspension Land Rover describes as “6D,” the Defender’s chassis was transformed for the Octa. The hydraulically interlinked suspension is fully diversified from the non-Octa Defender, the usage of semi‑active dampers to eliminate pitch and roll (up-and-down and aspect-to-aspect stream).
The suspension is fully diversified within the Octa, Gorman explains. Because the arrangement is hydraulic instead of a traditional passive strut, the SUV can adapt to the situation in real time instead of the suspension automatically finding a happy medium like a traditional strut would.
Passive dampers operate the usage of mechanical formulation like springs, dampers, and bushings to balance trek consolation and handling automatically with out intervention. On the Defender Octa, the semi-active arrangement involves longer and tougher wishbones and separate accumulators to manage the strain effectively.
On top of that, Land Rover collaborated with Canadian company Subpac to encompass its “Body and Soul” seats within the Defender Octa, which debuted within the Range Rover SV. These seats now not handiest cushion the physique, they pulse within the time with the song the usage of a tactile audio arrangement.
The Land Rover Defender Octa is geared up with a 626-hp gentle-hybrid V8, essentially the most vitality of any Defender. Image: Land Rover Reduce Dimbleby
Horsepower, torque, and a dry-sump arrangement
In some way, Land Rover built this SUV to zip from zero to 60 miles per hour in 3.8 seconds. For a car weighing nearly three tons, that’s handsome fast. Compare the Octa to a regular Defender 110, which weighs about a thousand pounds much less than its extra highly effective sibling. Car and Driver clocked the Defender 90 at 4.4 seconds with a 518-horsepower supercharged 5.0-liter engine beneath the hood.
The Octa version will get its pace from a supercar-worthy gentle hybrid twin-turbo 4.4-liter V8 it shares with the Range Rover SV. It boasts 626 horsepower, and its torque also makes a grand difference; the Octa is correct for 553 pound-toes, with an available enhance to 590 pound-toes in launch mode. To manage all of this vitality, the engineers at Land Rover opted for brand unusual intake and exhaust programs and extra heat shielding around the engine. A dry-sump lubrication arrangement stores the engine oil in a separate external tank instead of within the engine’s oil pan, or sump, as it can be in a moist-sump arrangement.
Equipped with mannequin-explicit brake pads, calipers and brake discs, the Defender Octa has the stopping vitality to back up its pace. Additional, the performance front brake discs are paired with six adversarial Brembo calipers. Adversarial calipers feature extra than one pistons (which transfer hydraulic strain into mechanical force to engage the brake pads) on each aspect of the rotor, creating an even distribution of clamping force. When the Defender Octa is absolutely engaged and whipping around within the grime, that braking force is critical.
After nearly 14,000 additional exams at some point of an advanced increase program created lawful for this motive, the Defender Octa is ready to waft—and land, safely.
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