Despite a starting price of R1 515100, the Land Rover Defender is easily the British group’s best-selling vehicle in SA. Here’s exactly how popular it was in H1 2023…

Virtually every month for the past couple of years, there’s a single Jaguar Land Rover product that stood out on the sales charts. Yes, we’re talking about the Land Rover Defender, which is typically the only model in the British group’s South African range to crack 3 figures.

Exactly how popular is the Whitley-based firm’s re-invented off-roader, then? Well, we’ve tallied up its local sales figures for the first half of 2023 to find out.

In the opening 6 months of the year, as many as 767 units of the Defender have been registered in South Africa, according to figures reported to Naamsa. This translates to a monthly average of around 128 units. The Slovakia-built SUV’s best single month was March 2023, when 151 units were sold locally, closely followed by June 2023 (140 units).

The Defender’s total was enough for it to place just outside the top 50 on the list of South Africa’s best-selling passenger vehicles for H1 2023 (finishing in 51st), quite some way ahead of the Range Rover Sport (353 units), Range Rover (222 units), Evoque (156 units), Discovery Sport (101 units), Velar (58 units) and Discovery (52 units). The best-selling Jaguar, meanwhile, was the F-Pace, with just 41 registrations.

The Defender family comprises a trio of body styles: 90, 110 and 130.

According to our maths, as many as 1335 units of the Defender were registered in South Africa in 2022. If sales continue at their current pace, the off-roader will beat that annual effort in 2023.

As a reminder, the local Defender line-up currently comprises 24 derivatives and features 3 body styles (90, 110 and 130) as well as various petrol (including plug-in hybrid) and diesel powertrains. Pricing kicks off at R1 515100, while the range is topped by the Defender 130 V8, which offers 386 kW from its supercharged 5.0-litre V8 engine and starts at R3 015 700.

The modern-day (unibody) Defender was revealed in Frankfurt in September 2019, before initial examples of the 110 arrived in South Africa in mid-2020. The short-wheelbase Defender 90 followed in mid-2021, with the 1st V8-powered models touching down in November of that year and the long-wheelbase 130 joining the local range towards the middle of 2022.

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