Land Rover Defender Octa 2025 review – a 911 GT3 off-roader

We’ve had the off-road supercars from Lamborghini and Porsche, but now it’s time for the originator of the off-road vehicle to hit back, as Land Rover unleashes its Defender Octa with spectacular results. As confusing a concept as it might be, this £145,000, 626bhp off-roader impresses in its very unique way as much as a blue-blood sports car does. We might not need such cars, but there’s a part of us that’s very pleased that some are still happy to oblige the silliest of ideas. 

There are, of course, many questions surrounding the Land Rover Defender Octa. You will undoubtedly have potentially just one of your own: why? Why build a 626bhp high performance version of a car that is considered a school run family car first, a utilitarian off-roader created for the wheat fields and wilderness second? Conventional wisdom suggests that if you’re going to build a performance car you wouldn’t start with a Defender. Unless, of course, you and your team were previously responsible for the exceptional Jaguar Project 7 and Project 8, and having delivered the Range Rover Sport SV your idle imagination turns to ‘what next’? Throw in the company’s decision to enter the Dakar Rally Raid and a halo road car to trade off the competition equivalent battering sand dunes adds to the justification. So too, customer demand for near three-ton behemoths that think they are 911 GT3s. 

Don’t be mistaken in thinking that the Octa is simply a regular V8-engined 110 Defender with some wider bodywork (+68mm) and increased ride height (+28mm) thrown at. Its BMW-sourced 4.4-litre twin-turbo engine has been heavily breathed on so it produces the same power as the Sport SV. Its chassis also takes from the same model with Land Rover’s 6D Dynamic chassis tech fitted, which includes hydraulically-linked continuously variable semi-active dampers. And while the 20-inch ‘motorsport’ wheels aren’t formed from carbon-fibre the brakes behind them are suitably impressive Brembo’s with the front discs measuring 400mm. The software to manage the existing and new hardware is equally bespoke to this £145,300 model. 

If such things are possible, the Octa makes a regular Defender look a touch meak. Its wider arches and elevated ride height give its appearance more attitude as well as altitude, its wheel design more Sahara functional than Kings Road statement. You need a little more energy to make the step up to the Octa's cockpit, once there the changes are more material than anything performance related, although the team behind it, led by SV’s Head of Vehicle Engineering, Stuart Adlard, deliver a diplomatic response when asked if they’d prefer the body and soul seats to be a little more motorsport inspired than they are.  

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Our destination is France, a couple of hours west of Toulouse at a facility used by the French military as well as WRC and Rally-Raid teams for testing. It’s made up of a series of courses from regular unmade roads, a number of hillside climbs you’d expect to see at any off-road facility and then there’s what you wouldn’t expect to see: a loop of high-speed, technical circuits that go from gravel special stage spec to chassis twisting DAKAR-spec leaps and ditches. Neither are designed for gentle meandering, but before the leaps, the drifts and mud wading we’ve turned right and headed for the road.  

There’s some tyre noise from the optional Goodyear Wrangler off-road tyre fitted to our test car, it’s more extreme than the 22-inch all-season tyre LR fits to all its road cars as standard and the tread blocks aren’t shy in moving around as you put some load through the steering, but you can still drive for mile after mile and not be distracted by their characteristics. Or you can take advantage of the added flex in the rubber and the tighter chassis to carry some attitude through corners, leaning more on the car’s outer edges and letting it move around more than you’d feel comfortable with in a Defender 110. With each mile the Octa shrugs off the numbness and remoteness regular Defenders have, and while it’s not exactly a keen conversationalist in the sense of a traditional sports car it feels tighter, more responsive and keen to engage on road than all but the very best performance SUVs. 

The hardware changes underpinning the Octa are accountable for the uplift in on-road performance. With the adoption of the LR’s 6D dynamics chassis set-up the Octa ditches its anti-roll bars, which when off-road provide an additional 119mm of axle articulation and on road allows for much flatter and calmer cornering. At each corner is a semi-active damper that’s combined with air springs with the former hydraulically linked around the car. Each damper is also equipped with its own Load Distribution Unit (LDU) that controls the three individual valves they also have, with the valves controlling rebound and compression and the LDU managing the system’s hydraulic pressure accordingly. 

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Fitted with longer wishbones (hence the Octa's extended width) it takes a four-square stance on the road, reacting to steering inputs cleanly and with the movement through the front wheels separated from the feedback of the tread blocks shuffling about. It makes for a Defender you want to set-up for a corner: pick a turn-in point, pour it in, wait for the settle then tap into the V8 to top-up your corner exit speed. Naturally there’s a drive mode to up the on-road ante, with Dynamic Mode tightening the steering, boosting the throttle’s sharpness and increasing roll resistance by 67 per cent and maximising pitch control; the changes feel more authentic here than they do in the majority of cars when you cycle through their drive modes. 

Even with its claimed unladen weight of 2585kg the V8 has the guts - 553lb ft or 590 in launch mode - to give it the hurry up, the 246bhp/ton is a little shy of Audi’s latest RS3, and while its mass means its off the line punch isn’t a match for the hyperhatch once the Octa is up and running it gathers moment with serious pace yet remains controlled rather than reaching an uncomfortable edge, managing its mass and bulk and throwing up no surprises. Call on its 400mm and six-piston front Brembo discs and callipers and the physics are harder to mask, but it pulls up consistently when called upon with only the slightest squirm from its Wranglers, which are speed limited to 100mph, down from 155mph of the all-season rubber. 

On the road the Octa is unexpectedly impressive, it’s not simply a Defender with the wick turned up and its sights set on headline performance figures - although it will reach 60mph in 3.8-seconds when launch mode is engaged - there’s integrity to what has been done here. Adlard and his team, led by Matt Becker and Jamal Hameedi, have created a Defender with a totally unexpected level of on-road ability and agility. It might say Defender on its bluff nose, but how it takes on a road is unlike any other that wears the same badge. 

Three years and more than 13,000 additional individual tests went into the Octa's development to guarantee it worked as well on the road, or a circuit if you’ve seen the clips across social media from the Nürburgring of its beautifully executed four-wheel drifts, as it does off. If not better. 

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Back at Chateau Lastours, an 800 hectare estate that, along with producing its own wine, is home to 80 kilometres of off-road test tracks, the Octa feels immediately at home. The SV team have spent as many hours here as they have anywhere else, primarily fine tuning the air-springs, semi-active dampers and the ABS braking system. From the on-site hotel car park to the 300 metre climb to the wind turbines at the summit, the first section we drive has the appearance of many off-road tracks you might have experienced and feels no more challenging than a track that runs through a stately home. Until you clock the regular Defender support vehicle behind is dropping further and further back every few metres. We’re still in Grass, Gravel and Snow mode selected via the Terrain Response system, but such is the breadth of the 6D chassis our speed is nearly double that of our followers. It’s down to the composure and bandwidth of the dampers allowing the car to float over the surface as each corner absorbs each impact it faces with engineered excellence. While the Octa’s cabin remains as calm and comfortable as it was on the road, the occupants behind are on the brink of being moved uncomfortably around the cabin. 

A rock crawl climb is dismissed with ease as we cut across to our final destination, the revised bumper design providing the required approach and departure angles, the trademark differentials and head spinning software managing the torque distribution at each wheel. 

But a Defender chewing through rocks is nothing new, a Defender taking on a WRC stage and not making a fool of itself is. Where a single press of the Octa button on the base of the steering wheel activates Dynamic mode for the road, hold it down longer and you’re into Octa off-road mode - the car’s high performance off-road setting. Not only does it allow you to use the off-road launch control function, it also halves roll resistance pressure in the dampers, removes pitch control and increases wheel travel. It also shifts more power and torque to the rear axle, maximises the damping force depending on the surface and with the stability controls slackened it also adapts the car’s ABS software to allow more lock up to allow a build up of loose surface material to form in front of the tyres to aid retardation. 

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On the gravel stage the Octa takes some recalibration of your mental processors. You’re not initially inclined to set a Defender up early in the corner, tuck its nose in and drive through the middle of the apex with more throttle than you initially think is unwise as you start to unwind the lock and apply more in the opposite direction before the exit is in sight. But that’s exactly what you need to do to extract the Octa's frankly remarkable ability. 

Across a loose surface it moves around with an eerie precision, every one of your inputs faithfully performed beneath you as this five metre long SUV pivots, slides and glides like a late Nineties era Evo across a snow covered supermarket carpark. 

With every corner, high speed braking area and rut and crest you learn something new about the car and yourself. It will pull off the most ridiculous drifts through a 180-degree hairpin, your right foot managing each slug of turbocharged torque, your hands moving around the wheel winding and unwinding lock as those meaty Goodyears bite through the surface to find traction with the tenacity to match a Cup 2 R gluing itself to the tarmac through Eau Rouge. 

At the end of the longer straights the Octa delivers another of its party pieces: its brakes. Hit the left pedal as hard as you can and while your brain tells you this is going to result in a hyper active brake pedal and very little retardation, the exact opposite happens. The ABS kicks in later as the front wheels lock for longer to build that wall of debris to help slow you, and boy does it stop with an unexpected force. 

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It’s hard to know if the braking performance is more impressive than how it flies and lands across the Rally Raid course jumps. Or how it allows you to constantly adjust your line as you hunt out the grip across loose surfaces without biting you for doing so. It’s the way it draws you into the action, engages you and just wants to have fun is the experience that never leaves you even months after driving it. No, it’s not a car we really need especially so in Europe - although those customers in North America and the Middle East who have the territory and space to allow them to use and enjoy an Octa as intended, do - but you could say the same about a 911 GT3 RS. 

Regardless of what you think of such vehicles, the Defender Octa is a remarkable achievement. Yes it’s the answer to the question we never knew required answering, but thankfully someone has and the result is unexpectedly exhilarating. After the Lamborghini Sterrato and Porsche 911 Dakar, Land Rover has hit back and the result is far more impressive. 

Price and rivals

It’s not a large pool to fish in, the high-performance off-roader. Land Rover charges £145,300 for the Defender Octa with that price climbing £160,800 for an Edition One (carbon fibre exterior trim and the 20-inch off-road wheels and tyres, upgraded interior fabrics and body coloured bonnet) and while an AMG G63 at £184,595 might look a suitable rival, if you asked it to do what an Octa can achieve you’ll learn a a very expensive lesson in why you shouldn’t over estimate a car’s ability based on how hefty the door feels.

You could buy a couple of £68,970 Ariel Nomad 2s for the price of one Octa, and that’s really the only option to have more fun on four wheels off-road as you’ll get.