I quite like it, although it's not quite what I thought it would be. I wonder whether they conducted a couple of retrospective design studies, looking at where the old defender might have ended up had it been more comprehensively refreshed every 10 years or so?
We have a 109 (full tilt) and a Disco 4. Although we adore the 109 it just isn't up to modern family life, and maintenance is significantly more demanding than the Disco. A more recent Defender has the character and heritage, but is also not a realistic family bus: too slow, too noisy, too uncomfortable. The Disco 5 is pig ugly, and we wouldn't chop our 4 in for one, but this new defender will have us, and many other Disco 4 owners I suspect, looking long and hard at it.
To look at it another way: what other vehicles from other brands is this up against?
Sure, it's bigger in almost every way than the old defender, but it pretty much had to be to get through crash these days. Look at the Merc G-wagon (also a long, long way from its origins), or the mini, or the golf, or any other long-running model. 85 ECUs is just another way of saying it uses can and lin to keep the wiring harness down to manageable proportions, just like any modern vehicle. There's a little control unit in every switch pack, and they all talk to each other over can. OK, more electronics does mean less reliability, but this can also be seen in the relative reliability of Skoda, VW and Audi: they are the same architecture and the same technologies, after all.
The automotive world is now a very different place to 1948, and many of the derivatives the old series vehicles were available in just don't make sense in any realistic way: transit-and transporter-type vehicles have taken some of the market, L200-type semi-commercials some more, and I can only assume LR ran the numbers and decided it wasn't worth trying to complete because the margins weren't there: all the operators in those segments are huge and have a lot of usable carry-over content from the rest of their ranges. Even the army's needs for vehicles is different now: a defender is a bit much as a batallion runabout, and too little as a patrol vehicle in Iraq.
Trying to make a one-size-fits-all vehicle worked back in a post-war empire world, but those days are long gone and not coming back. Today it just means it'll be out-competed in each niche.
