Land Rover Defender 110 chauffeur hire

You sit up and forward in a Defender rather than back and down, and the whole cabin is arranged around that. The windows are tall and close to upright, the roof is high, and there is a strip of glass above the rear side windows that lets you see the tops of trees from the back seat. On a long run through good country that turns out to be worth a great deal.

The rear bench is flat and broad rather than sculpted. Two adults have a lot of room, three fit properly for a longer stretch than most saloons allow, and there is enough headroom for a hat, which sounds trivial until you have carried four people to a shoot in September.

It is a practical interior rather than a soft one, and that is the point of it. Surfaces are meant to be wiped down, the floor takes wet boots without ceremony, and nothing in the back of the car is ruined by a dog that has been in a river. On a shooting weekend or a location day, that matters a great deal more than the quality of the stitching does.

The Defender is most often booked for one end of a journey rather than the whole of it. Somebody lands at Manchester, Edinburgh or a smaller regional field and then has ninety minutes of B-road and a private drive ahead of them, and the vehicle that makes sense for that second half is not the one that makes sense for the M60.

The airport half is handled exactly as it would be in any car here. The flight is tracked, the chauffeur waits inside the terminal with a board, and the luggage goes into the back rather than on a lap. The high tailgate makes loading four cases and a gun slip a one-person job instead of a two-person one.

Where it changes things is arrival. A saloon dropping guests at a house with a hundred metres of loose gravel and a cattle grid does so carefully and slowly; a Defender does it without anyone in the back noticing there was anything to think about.

A Defender carries its weight high, so the smoothness a passenger feels comes entirely from how early the chauffeur does everything. Braking begins further back, steering inputs are single and deliberate rather than corrected, and a roundabout is taken at a speed that keeps the body flat rather than at the speed the car could manage.

Off tarmac the technique inverts. Momentum matters more than power, the line is chosen for the ruts rather than the shortest route, and the car is kept in one gear through a bad section rather than shuffling between them. Done properly, four people in the back carry on their conversation across a field.

The other consideration is where it will not go. It is a tall vehicle and it does not clear every multi-storey barrier, so an airport collection in a Defender is planned around a surface car park or a designated pick-up area rather than the short-stay levels a saloon would use.