The Landrovers Panterra review: what's it like to drive a 600bhp, 375-mile electric Defender?

Wait, another restomod?

Hold those horses. On the surface of it, yes: this is a Land Rover Defender that’s been restored and treated to a shiny new powertrain and luscious leather and aluminium trim. So far, so familiar.

Follow the path of three-quarters of The Landrovers’ customers and you’ll get a Corvette-sourced V8 engine – anything from a 450bhp LS3 to a 650bhp LT4 – hooked up to an automatic gearbox for the sort of boisterous performance and booming soundtrack a slab-sided, definitively not aerodynamic Defender shell can only just keep up with.

Made in the Netherlands, prices start at standard restomod money – the euro equivalent of £335,000 – but soon soar as the 28 annual buyers get busy with the near-limitless bespoke potential. So much so, each commission is gifted its own unique name and a bold clockface inside, which they get to sit and mood-board with TLR’s young, effervescent design team.

What do the other quarter buy?

You’re looking at The Landrovers Panterra, the fully electric one. Electromods aren’t new and they rarely avoid controversy. Stick some reconditioned Tesla batteries inside an old 911 or E-type and you can attract the level of online hate usually reserved for political battlefronts.

This is no mere transplant, though. TLR has spent the last seven years building up to this point, redesigning almost every component beneath that familiar Landie silhouette to properly do justice to the engineering depths it’s explored.

There are new mounting points for fresh, fully independent suspension, necessary to manage the quad in-wheel motors – which allow adaptive torque vectoring across the chassis. You’ve a choice of air or coilover springs. There’s a newly electric steering system with a much tighter rack than before. And the small matter of its 600bhp and 4,720lb ft claims for a 5.5 second sprint to 62mph that feels otherworldly when it’s aboard a 2,900kg chunk.

Well, that’s hefty…

It’s not quite an electric G-Wagen, but it’s nearly there. Blame the 200kWh of battery capacity that the engineers have filled every nook and cranny with. In fairness, the weight split isn’t far off 50:50, so handling isn’t too unwieldy because of it. But you still won’t want to hustle this like the Ferrari Purosangue it commands similar money to. 

The customers are affluent, after all, and the 375-mile range claim is necessary for them to not feel too embarrassed to discuss the latest addition to their garage. Many of them properly use their cars, too, sending them back to The Landrovers’ Amsterdam base each winter for a bit of love after a tough summer of adventuring. Clearly the Panterra couldn’t be a curious footnote alongside the V8 when it came to road-tripping potential.

And it’s okay to drive?

More than. The air suspension of this example (named ‘Rica’) makes it a polite and placid thing through town, as does a neater, more accurate steering rack than TLR’s petrol-powered Landies. This is an old-school Defender you could happily run errands in without it getting on your nerves, a feeling only exacerbated by its powertrain and throttle calibration.

There’s a linearity to the pedal’s operation that makes it a cinch to operate in town, on motorways or anywhere in between. Dare to take one of these off-road and its precise power delivery ought to be rather useful. There are also three brake regen levels and a fair chance you’ll keep their touchscreen menu awake to toggle through them on the fly.

TLR developed its own software for the central display – indeed, almost every component outside of its modern Defender gearlever has been designed in-house – and the systems here are quicker and less frustrating than many of their OEM equivalents. The Panterra is proof that ‘bespoke’ goes way beyond some rare leather hides or indulgent paint samples – specialising the bits you can’t see can transform how a car feels.

Is this how you’d spec yours?

I’d really want to try one on the coilovers to see if they tied the handling down a bit more. The precision of its powertrain occasionally encourages a level of pace that gets its comfort-minded setup into a bit of a fluster, disguising the clever work of the torque vectoring beneath. More focused springs and road-biased tyres might tease some genuine cornering ability out of this car. Even if that’s ultimately not what it’ll ever major at…

And how much is it?

TLR asks another €100,000 for the electric powertrain, for a starting price of just under half a million euros – or about £425,000. It’s a lot, but this is a thriving corner of the market: in its 15 years in business, the company has made over 250 cars and is currently producing 28 a year, each one the beneficiary of 3,000 hours of work.

It’s appropriately nice inside, TLR faithfully replacing all the standard plastic trim pieces – door pulls and the like – with beautifully milled aluminium. So you get better quality, but also the chance to replace stuff simply from a regular Land Rover parts shelf if you get stuck in a far-flung corner of the world. The leather, carpets and stitching work hard to live up to the price tag and the company’s own seat bases even free up a bit more legroom than before, though your elbows inevitably still feel pinched.

But it’s what the Panterra showcases that’s really worth noting here. The tech beneath feels too promising to be confined ‘only’ to restored Defenders. “Our end goal was insane for a company as small as ours,” admits Frank Tijs, who co-owns The Landrovers alongside its founders Peter Zeisser and Daniel van Oort. “We have some big ideas and a new investor coming in that basically takes our platform into a whole new vehicle programme.”

In-wheel motors (and the torque vectoring they allow) form only a small part of the EV industry right now, but it’s one full of promise. Where this vibrant young Dutch company takes the technology next is something we’re excited to see. Not just another restomod after all.

Images: The Landrovers