The Land Rover Defender Finally Won Me Over
„I could be an off-road guy, right?“ No response from my wife, who definitely hears me in the other room. With more than 80,000 acres of unspoiled Florida wilderness at my doorstep, the idea of owning a Land Rover Defender and spending weekends on the trail appeals to my inner outdoorsman—the Outbound model specifically.
The Outbound is essentially a long-wheelbase 130 model with two rows instead of three. It has a side-mounted ladder, an exterior storage box, and a massive cargo hold. Land Rover ditched the extra chairs for additional tie-down spots and a capacious flat, rubberized load floor. If I were a real outdoorsman with…. things, I’d thoroughly enjoy how much room there is to work with.
There’s 43.7 cubic feet behind the second row and a whopping 89.0 cubic feet if you fold the second row flat, as in the standard 130, and a 1,840-pound maximum payload capacity. The exterior storage box offers a titch of extra cargo too, although it’s mostly for looks. You can maybe fit some tightly folded-up ponchos in there.
The rubberized mat is easy to rip out and hose off, and there’s still a sunroof and A/C vents behind the second row in case you want to take the pups on a trail ride. The side-mounted ladder folds down far enough that you can easily step onto it without pulling a groin, and the Goodyear Wrangler Duratrac all-terrain tires improve the roof carrying capacity by 150 pounds. It can now hold 370 pounds in motion—instead of 220—and up to 661 pounds static.
