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2023 Land Rover Defender SVR Rumored With BMW Twin-Turbo V8 Engine

Long before the all-new Defender came out with a unibody design, the rumor mill was full to the brim with BMW hearsay. But eons later, there’s still no Bavarian V8 under the hood of the luxurious off-road vehicle.
2022 Land Rover Defender V8 20 photos
Photo: Land Rover
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The rumors, however, are not complete nonsense because the British and German companies were once best friends. BMW acquired the Rover Group in 1994, spent a lot of money to develop the third-generation Range Rover, then dismantled the group in 2000 due to billions of euros of losses.

Codenamed L322, the gen-three Range Rover features many electronics and two engine options developed and supplied by the German overlord. The British-German collaboration doesn’t end there, though. The automakers joined hands in June 2019 to develop electric drive units, and BMW is open to further cooperation to improve their economies of scale and all that jazz.

Given these circumstances, Motor Trend has brought an old rumor back from the dead. The cited publication expects the 2023 Land Rover Defender SVR next year with a twin-turbo V8 engine, most likely the S63 from the M5. Another possibility comes in the guise of the S68, which is supposed to be an evolution of the S63. The thing is, can you spot the elephant in the room?

I do. There’s no photographic evidence of the Defender SVR at the moment of writing, not even a single spy shot. It’s also worth remembering that Land Rover already has a V8 in the form of a supercharged 5.0-liter engine, a rather old powerplant that plays second fiddle to the aforementioned S63.

But wait, there’s more! Jaguar Land Rover’s new head honcho said that Jaguar is going electric by 2025 while Land Rover will launch five battery-electric vehicles by 2026. Come 2030, every single Land Rover vehicle - including the Defender - will either be electric or feature a BEV option.

Alas, the BMW-powered Defender SVR seems to be a wild pipedream.
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Editor's note: 2022 Land Rover Defender V8 pictured.

About the author: Mircea Panait
Mircea Panait profile photo

After a 1:43 scale model of a Ferrari 250 GTO sparked Mircea's interest for cars when he was a kid, an early internship at Top Gear sealed his career path. He's most interested in muscle cars and American trucks, but he takes a passing interest in quirky kei cars as well.
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