The Land Rovers Panterra | PH assessment

The company has been in existence for 15 years and has reached 70 employees. Total production has exceeded 250 cars and currently stands at 28 per year, with each example taking 3,000 hours to assemble. While I’m bombarding you with numbers, 75 percent of sales currently consist of the car you’d probably expect when you first see a TLR product: with a Corvette V8 – from a 450bhp LS3 to a 650bhp LT4 – under the hood and an abundance of leather and aluminum inside, with a price tag of €382,500 (about £335,000) on top. Especially if you get carried away by the tailor-made offer, as most customers do.

And the end result is sympathetic; fast in a straight line, a fantastic soundtrack and just good enough in the corners. There are still some typical Defender issues – a huge turning circle, marginal elbow room – but TLR provides more legroom via its own seat bases, while numerous suspension options help keep body roll in check. It’s not exactly unique in its market, but it is attractive.

However, things really get interesting for the remaining 25 percent of turnover. The company was co-founded by friends Peter Zeisser and Daniel van Oort when they put together a modestly modified Land Rover to go on an adventure in South Africa. The trip fell through, so they stayed home and sold the car, finding an investor (who is still on their books). Seven years after TLR, they gained an additional co-owner in the form of Frank Tijs. He came to them to electromodify his Volkswagen T2 bus, but instead helped spark an electric revolution that led to the Panterra.

This isn’t just a powertrain transplant; it’s a rethinking of what a Defender should be capable of. So even though it uses the same donor grenades as TLR’s supply point, everything changes underneath. New mounting points for fully independent suspension are required to manage the quad-in-wheel motors. You can choose from air or coil springs. There’s a fresh electric steering system with a much tighter rack than before. And the small matter of a peak power of 600 hp…

The performance claims are blunted a little by the 2,900kg curb weight (more, if you’ve been sloppy with the options), although it’s still a surprising thing that’s completely lightened whether you’ve put the F-Type-era JLR gear selector into sport mode or not. But its greatest trick is to be calm and polite on a more subdued throttle, with a linearity in the pedal’s operation that makes it a breeze around town, on highways or anywhere in between. Dare to drive one of these off-road and the precise power delivery should be quite useful.

There are three levels of brake regeneration and chances are you’ll be keeping their touchscreen menu awake to scroll through it straight away. TLR has developed its own software for the central display – virtually every part outside the gear lever is designed in-house – and is quicker to understand than some of the OEM systems we’ve been confused by this year.

Does it handle? Well, the steering is sharp and agile, and you can steer it into corners with confidence. But if you have too much speed – or brake too late in a bend – this can cause unrest. These independent motors enable smart torque vectoring across the chassis, but the floating air springs of this example (called ‘Rica’) do not provide ultimate control in the corners.

There are of course those coilovers available that should hold it more firmly. But how much you really need to load a nearly three-ton Defender is probably a more relevant question. With air suspension it is a wonderful thing to float around quietly; only the sound of the knobby all-terrain tires and the inevitable wind noise at higher cruising speeds disturb the peace. Very strange words to type about a classic Landie.

The trade-off for the gigantic weight of the 200 kWh battery is the 600 kilometer range it unlocks. The engineers considered a lower battery capacity, and future Panterras using a Defender 90 chassis will simply have to scale back the kilowatt hours for packaging reasons. But while range continues to dominate the EV conversation, they wanted a metric that affluent owners wouldn’t be ashamed to reveal. The Panterra asks another $100,000 over an LS3, I should add, putting the entry price well above $400,000.

Folks at The Landrovers are well aware that projects like this attract online hate – they’ve read a lot written about their own work – but they make the expected claims that they’re just freshening up tired and dirty old Defender shells. And the day-to-day usability has improved so much, the car’s city manners are now so slick, that this seems a really interesting and feasible thing to do with a derelict old Landie. They also brought Land Rover’s own EV program to production, don’t forget that. Moreover, the Panterra project is ‘just’ the showpiece of something much bigger.

“We have some big ideas and we have a new investor coming in who will integrate our platform, which is currently wearing a Defender jacket, into an entirely new vehicle program,” says Frank, whose T2 was never electrified. “For us this is a huge thing and everyone is extremely excited. The journey here has been very steep, but now the future looks bright.” Amsterdam’s unlikely car manufacturing center may be about to go one step further.

Battery: 200 kWh, maximum 150 kW charging
Transfer: Quad-in-wheel motors, four-wheel drive
Power (hp): 600
Torque (lb⋅ft): 4,720
0-100 km/h: 5.5 seconds
Top speed: 180 km/h (limited)
Weight: 2,900 kg
Range: 375 miles
Price: £425,000+

Image credit: The Land Rovers