Brilliant dredging bin: on an adventure with the modern all-terrain vehicle from the unknown Ineos | Car

As soon as you get behind the wheel of the new Ineos Grenadier, you immediately discover that it is much better than such a classic Defender. At least on one point: the seating position. Where in such an older Land Rover you always sit at a strange angle to the steering wheel, the workplace in the Grenadier immediately feels good. The seats (purchased from the famous car seat brand Recaro) are always manually operated: according to Ineos, electrical adjustment makes the car unnecessarily heavy and complicated. You really don’t miss anything: the Recaros offer a lot of support and are spacious. The steering column is also much more adjustable and there is actually enough space for long legs. Even if you are 2.04 meters tall. That is already a big plus.

“It has to be, because Jim is almost two meters himself”, reacts Donna Falconer, product specialist at Ineos Automotive. With ‘Jim’ she refers to Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the big boss of the British chemical company Ineos and the spiritual father of the new Grenadier. Ratcliffe is – in addition to being a very wealthy businessman – also an adventurer at heart; he is now well into his sixties but runs marathons through deserts, is an avid sportsman and in his spare time likes to dive into the mud with all-terrain vehicles. It is not without reason that he is a big fan of skilled mud wrestlers such as the aforementioned Defender, but also of the Mercedes-Benz G-class, the Jeep Wrangler and the Toyota Land Cruiser.

According to Falconer and her colleagues, Ratcliffe, who is invariably simply referred to as “Jim” by his team, is incredibly passionate about his new creation. The idea for the Grenadier arose after Land Rover stopped production of the classic Defender. Ratcliffe wanted to buy the production line but after Land Rover refused that deal, he decided to make a ‘worthy successor’ himself. That is the Grenadier and it should be ‘beyond excellent’, says Falconer.

If you walk around the Grenadier, you can clearly see that the Defender served as a source of inspiration. Their noses look the same, the overall proportions are very similar, their heights are almost identical, but otherwise the two cars have nothing to do with each other. With a length of almost 4.93 meters, the Ineos is a lot longer than the Land Rover (4.60 meters), while it is also considerably wider at almost 15 centimeters. The large spare wheel on the back remained, but instead of one large door, the Grenadier has two rear doors. The left of the two is slightly narrower, so that you can easily load small items or a dog, for example.

For the time being, Ineos offers a choice of a ‘Station wagon’ with four side doors, which comes standard with five seats. There is also a commercial vehicle version, the ‘Utility’, available with two or five passenger seats, if desired. In addition, a pick-up with a double cabin is also planned, which, according to Ineos, will be especially popular in the United States and Australia. Ineos does not yet reveal whether there will be a shorter and an extended version – just like with the Land Rover Defender. When asked, the manager of the factory in Hambach indicates that the production line is ready for this and that ‘it has already been taken into account in the design of the car.’ First the ‘normal’ Grenadier can prove that there are enough customers eager for an Ineos.

According to Jim Ratcliffe and his team, the Grenadier fills a gap created by other new off-road vehicles today having become too luxurious and complicated. The Ineos, for example, does not get air suspension: that is sensitive and can only break. You do not want that when you are driving your Grenadier in inhospitable areas. So this modern all-terrain vehicle rolls on technology that is as classic as it is proven: steel springs with rock-solid dampers, rugged types that have been developed to absorb hard hits. The development was done by the specialists of Magna-Steyr from Austria, who were also responsible, among other things, for the original G-class from Mercedes-Benz.

The chassis is a ‘simple’ ladder frame, to which the steel passenger compartment is screwed: that is less advanced than a self-supporting body, but very strong, super stiff and therefore relatively indestructible. And that was another requirement Ratcliffe placed on his developers: the Grenadier should be able to do just about anything, except abandon its users. Of course he has to look nice in front of a British country house, but he also has to pull a heavy plow for a farmer or bring a doctor to his destination in the most inhospitable places in Africa without murmuring.

That is also the reason why Ineos gives the Grenadier relatively old engines, without a hybrid or fully electric drive. You can choose from a six-cylinder turbo engine on petrol or diesel, both from the BMW shelves. Although Ineos has modernized them to meet the latest exhaust gas standards, the engines are relatively simple – also to maintain. “We think a hybrid or fully electric version would just be too heavy and unnecessarily complicated,” explains Donna Falconer. “For the customers who will be using this generation of the Grenadier, it is especially important that the car is indestructible and reliable.” Behind the scenes, Ineos is reportedly also working on models that run on batteries or hydrogen, but the brand does not expect them within the next five years.

How the classically designed chassis behaves on the asphalt of the A2 or the cobblestones of a Dutch village street remains to be seen, but after our first acquaintance it is clear that the Ineos Grenadier feels perfectly at home in the mud. We plow through an abandoned mine in the border region between Germany and France aboard a hand-built prototype. There are no functioning airbags yet, a bright red dead man’s button sticks out of the improvised dashboard and various driver assistance systems are still missing. But it doesn’t bother the Grenadier: whatever you throw at it for its off-road tires, the technology doesn’t flinch.

As a matter of course, all Grenadier models have permanent four-wheel drive to make good progress on poor ground. You don’t have to change gears yourself, there is always an automatic gearbox with eight gears. It shifts very smoothly and will keep the engine speeds nice and low during normal use. So comfortable. But if the conditions get really challenging, you can choose to put the extra ‘transfer case’ in low gear: then the drive forces are slowed down to get the power from the engine to the wheels optimally and then you can pry yourself free from the most difficult situations.

Although it has rained a lot in recent days and the mud in the mine is soft and slimy, in the Grenadier it turns out to be enough to put the automatic transmission in ‘D’, accelerate slowly and steer smoothly. The low gearing is not necessary, even once it gets a bit steeper. This copy has the six-cylinder petrol engine on board, which has been adapted to BMW specifications to provide more pulling power at low revs.

That doesn’t miss its effect: the Ineos crawls up the craziest hills with awe-inspiring ease. Sometimes the accelerator pedal has to go a little deeper to the ground to reach the top: then the powertrain immediately puts its shoulders under it, the tires look for grip, but then the Grenadier still manages to pull itself up effectively. That gives a nice boost of adrenaline, despite the fact that you are sitting high and dry on – heated – chairs. Get over that, in your classic Defender!

Ineos is currently working hard on the final stages of the Grenadier development. As soon as all the dots have been put on the i, the car will also be on the market with us later this year. For details and maintenance, future customers can contact all Bosch Car Service branches, as Ineos has a partnership with that company. Towards the market launch, the British brand will also announce all final specifications, as well as the price. In the corridors we were already confided that the car ‘should cost about 60,000 euros in Germany’. With our higher tax on emissions, among other things, you have to take into account a considerably higher starting price, but then you have a brilliant dredging box that – even in prototype form – leaves a downright indestructible impression.