Missing the old Land Rover Defender? No chance of getting it back, but you could try something else. It is called the Ineos Grenadier and is even more impressive than a Defender.
The latest-generation Grenadier prototypes were approved by INEOS Chairman, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, after negotiating the notorious trails of the Schöckl mountain near Magna Steyr’s HQ in Austria, as part of an engineering gateway assessment.
Renowned for their unforgiving and destructive hard-rock terrain, the Austrian mountains have been used for decades by Magna Steyr, INEOS’s engineering partner, as the ultimate test of off-road capability and durability for special purpose vehicles.
The intensification of the Grenadier’s testing programme, which will see more than 130 second-phase prototypes accumulate 1.8 million kilometres in extreme environments around the world, follows unavoidable delays through 2020. To achieve its rigorous testing targets, INEOS has revised its project timings and pushed back the start of Grenadier production.
Earlier this year, engineers successfully completed extensive cold weather engine calibration with Grenadier prototypes in northern Sweden. The next phase of the development and validation process will subject the Grenadier to intense hot weather testing in some of the world’s harshest environments, including Death Valley in the USA and the dunes of the Middle East.
