Land Rover will expand the Defender lineup within the next two years to include an EV. But that will still leaving a pick-up-shaped hole in the range, one Heritage Customs can now fill – for twice the price of the standard SUV. You might have come across Heritage Customs before. Boss Niels van Roij designed a Ferrari Testarossa Targa and Daytona-inspired 599 shooting brake, and the firm’s current lineup includes a Valiance convertible conversion for the Defender 90 that we wrote about in May last year.
The Valiance pickup is based on a Defender
from the opposite end of the size spectrum, the long-wheelbase 130 X Dynamic
SE, that number denoting the distance in inches between the front and rear
wheels. In standard guise the 130 offers up
to eight seats but Heritage Customs ditches the third row and the upper portion
of the rear bodywork, and fits its own liftgate embossed with the Heritage
name.
Spec details are few and far between and
all of the available images appear to be renderings, rather than photographs of
a real truck. But the firm is definitely taking orders – it even has a ‘Buy
with Apple Pay’ button, like you might find on a Shopify store selling
something for us$ 15 not 10,000 times that amount.
An All Blacks edition is listed on the
website for € 142,562, but text below suggests the truck’s price range ‘lies
around’ € 155,000, which equates to US$ 166,000 at current exchange rates. Two
things you need to know about that price are that it’s almost double the price
of a donor 130 X Dynamic SE (currently US$ 81,400 in the US), which is thankfully
included in the package, and that it excludes taxes. So don’t expect farmers to
be hauling sheep around in one any time soon.
Land Rover itself has suggested that it
could make a Defender pickup, something that would definitely add to the
model’s appeal in the US and Australia. But we’ve yet to see any solid proof
that a Defender ute is in the works.
