If there’s one notable absentee in the current Land Rover Defender line, it’s a pickup truck. The original Defender, and the even older Land Rover Series trucks it was based on, were all available with a bed, but the modern Land Rover company doesn’t seem that interested in building one.
But Jim Ratcliffe and his Ineos team are. Ratcliffe created the Grenadier Station Wagon to fill what he perceived as a gap left by the death of the old Defender and Ineos has confirmed a pickup variant, the Grenadier Quartermaster Double-Cab, is coming to July’s Goodwood Festival of Speed.
Ineos’s teaser release and sole accompanying image of the truck don’t give away much about the spec of the pickup, like the wheelbase, but fortunately, we’ve already seen spy shots of the prototype testing, and they’re far more revealing. Those images show the Quartermaster is identical to the Station Wagon up to the B-pillars, but significantly different thereafter. The wheelbase is much longer than the SUV’s 115-in (2,922 mm) chassis and the rear overhang is far greater to allow a usefully large bed.
Related: Ineos Grenadier To Start At $71,500 In The US, About As Much As A Land Rover Defender
The Quartermaster has the Grenadier name stamped into the rear gate and the same circular LED lights as its SUV brother. And in one further change, the spare wheel – located on the rear door of the SUV – now stands upright, inside the pickup bed. As for engines, Ineos isn’t saying at this stage, but they’ll almost certainly be the exact same 3.0-liter, six-cylinder petrol and diesel engines offered in the passenger truck, at least initially.
We say initially because Ineos is dead serious about hydrogen power, which it views as a far more suitable power source for a working truck than batteries. We’ve known for a while that Ineos was working on bringing the tech to the Grenadier and this year it’s bringing a prototype to Goodwood for the world to see. The Grenadier Hydrogen Fuel Cell (FCEV) Technology Demonstrator and Quartermaster will both be on display in the First Glance Paddock and will also be driven up the hillclimb route on each of the four days of the Festival.
Meanwhile, anyone wanting to get more closely acquainted with the Grenadier will be able to get behind the wheel of the original Station Wagon model and take it around an off-road course.
