“Can I try the siren?” No matter how nonchalantly one attempts to make such a request, it will always betray that, beneath the thin carapace of middle age, there still beats the heart of a six-year-old boy. Does that stop me? Of course not. And as the blue lights flash and the siren wails, the six-year-old boy grins.
I’m ensconced within the passenger seat of an Ineos Grenadier. It is one of the first Grenadiers in the country to have been sold to a commercial client and put to work; given that client is an independent lifeboat, Nith Inshore Rescue, it’s also the first to be used in a search-and-rescue (SAR) role.
Nith Inshore Rescue is, as its name suggests, based on the River Nith, which rises in Ayrshire and flows between the Carsphairn Hills before winding through Dumfries and emptying into the Solway Firth. The lifeboat’s catchment area takes in not only the river but the shores of the Firth, too – a treacherous area where shifting sands and fast tides catch out many a beachgoer.
To that end, the rescue team isn’t restricted to launching the boat from the slipway at its station at Glencaple; indeed, more often than not, the crew will climb aboard a vehicle and tow the boat to one of several launch sites in order to reach the casualty more quickly.
Until recently, the vehicle in question was a gently ageing Land Rover Defender, which has been replaced by the Grenadier. To find out whether the crew is happy with its new machine, I’ve come to meet them. And what better way to do so than in a civilian Grenadier?
Second sight
Doing so also gives us a chance to take another look at the Grenadier. Last year my colleague Andrew English found it impressive but marred by frustrating quality niggles. With a year’s worth of production under its belt, has Ineos resolved those niggles?
London to Dumfries and back again is a round trip of almost 800 miles, most of them on motorway – far from this car’s ideal turf. That might seem a little unfair. But then again, if you’re spending £76,000 on a car such as this you might reasonably expect it to be capable in every situation, not just off-road.
That’s certainly the case with the new Land Rover Defender – the car the Grenadier was built as a reaction to. Sir Jim Ratcliffe, Ineos’s chief executive, felt the new Defender’s arrival left space in the market for a more rugged and utilitarian alternative in the vein of the old Defender.
The Grenadier was conceived with that use in mind, after Land Rover refused to sell Ratcliffe the rights to the Defender itself – hence the more-than-passing resemblance.
Does it drive like a Defender? Well, yes. But also, no.
Like the Defender, the Grenadier is an off-road vehicle first and foremost, without compromise. You can feel it in the loose, wandering steering – to reduce the effect of kickback on rocky trails – and the unsettled, swaying ride quality, a by-product of the old-fashioned body-on-frame construction rather than a car-type monocoque.
Feats of endurance
But while the Grenadier exhibits these traits, they are an order of magnitude less severe than those of an old Defender; the ride, for example, is considerably smoother, the steering more direct. And no Defender had cruise control, climate control, Apple CarPlay and so on. Indeed, it feels exactly as intended – an upgraded, modernised Defender, but still a Defender at heart.
Yet it still requires constant attention at motorway speeds. 800 miles is a long time to spend gripping the steering, feeding in minor corrections to keep the Grenadier in its lane as the huge, knobbly tyres do their best to wander off along a ridge in the road surface.
With a petrol engine – the same BMW 3.0-litre straight-six in the Z4 M40i (and, for that matter, the Toyota Supra) – it’s a breathtakingly expensive way to travel, too. Even the official figures don’t credit the Grenadier in this form with any more than 19.6mpg on average; on my fairly gentle motorway run, the trip computer refuses to read more than 19.2mpg.
Nith Inshore Rescue’s example, thankfully for them, is a diesel. Mind you, even this can’t notch up more than 27.4mpg in government tests. For its crew, though, that’s irrelevant. What makes the difference is the extra power the Grenadier offers compared with their previous Defender.
“When you are pulling a big trailer like we are, power makes a difference,” says Peter Bryden, the service’s secretary and one of the lifeboat’s helmsmen. “At the end of the day it’s not so much about speed response, it’s about power. But at the same time when you’re trying to get to a treble-nine call and you’re not even at the speed limit, it’s quite frustrating.”
Uphill struggle
“There’s a place on the A75 we use all the time called the Glen,” Bryden continues. “If you’re going up there trying to get to a blue-light call at a maximum of 45mph, like we were in the Defender, and there are wagons overtaking you, it’s quite embarrassing.”
But the extra power isn’t the only thing the Grenadier offers the crew. “There’s the benefit of being able to jump into that vehicle, especially when you’re quite a big boy like me, and not to be almost sitting on the passenger’s lap. To be able to move your arms around without having to open the windows is a complete luxury,” Bryden says.
“Then there are the different types of tech that you’re able to wire into it,” he adds. “That was becoming increasingly complicated to do. We had done everything ourselves on the Defender for the blue-light set-up. When we were lifting up the passenger seat and looking underneath it, if we’d found a bird or a mouse nesting in there right among the wires, we wouldn’t have been surprised.”
By contrast, the Grenadier was converted to the crew’s specification using equipment from Haztec in Leeds, which supplied a complete light bar and siren combination with its own wiring loom. This is controlled using a bespoke panel that nestles beneath the Grenadier’s own rugged-looking centre console, leaving the car’s roof-mounted accessory switches free for alternative uses, such as the winch.
So far, the Grenadier has been put through 2,000 miles that Bryden describes as being “quite hard, even harder when you get there”. He points out that their patch contains a microcosm of Britain’s terrain; forest tracks, muddy fields, rocks and boulders, marshland, sand flats and, of course, fast A-roads are all in a day’s work for the Grenadier.
Quality control
Despite this, the crew have had no complaints so far. “We got asked the other day, ‘What would you change about it?’ We’ve already moved the bulkhead behind the rear seats back [a feature of the commercial variant on which Nith’s Grenadier is based] so the seats can get back. And just in the driver space, there’s a plastic bit on the left-hand side we’re going to change.
“But they’re the only complaints. And at the end of the day it is getting put through its paces when we use it; it’s going from cold to warm very quickly and then it’s doing what we need to do when we get there, so I would say it’s doing quite well.”
So are Ineos’s quality issues a thing of the past? It would be nice to think so, but my trip to Scotland hasn’t passed without incident. First, on a stretch of the M40, the Ineos was insistent that it had high pressure in one of its rear tyres – then both of them – and continued even after I’d pulled over, checked the pressures and reset the system. The only way to convince it otherwise was to reduce the pressure fractionally.
That could just be a calibration issue. More of a concern was the fact that while in Scotland, our car’s “off-road mode” – which deactivates the stop-start system, the lane departure and parking sensors, as well as the seatbelt warning, all of which allows for fewer distractions when driving off-road – decided to quit for a while.
Our Ineos wranglers’ solution is to lock the car and walk away, hoping the orange warning light hasn’t reappeared next time the engine is started. Amazingly, this works, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence – but the warning fails to reappear for the rest of the trip.
Like father, like son
It’s hard, therefore, to argue that Ineos has solved the niggles. Land Rover Defender owners will probably remark, with tongue firmly in cheek, that this is simply a continuation of the ethos of the original – warts and all. But in a car costing this much, owners might not be laughing.
The Grenadier is, after all, about the same price as a new Defender, which is light years ahead on the road; in the rough, meanwhile, it won’t be very far behind the more rugged Ineos. And when Toyota brings its new Land Cruiser to the UK later this year, it will provide an option that will probably be able to do all of this while also cracking the reliability nut.
There’s no doubt, however, that the Grenadier has its place. When its combination of strength and power are required, for example to haul a lifeboat at high speed over every kind of rough ground, it is undoubtedly the car for the job.
Also, the six-year-old inside me would contend, it’s improved markedly by the addition of blue lights and a siren.
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