Brand-new vintage Land Rover Defenders, yours for $250,000

• Twisted Automotive is one of the many companies that will sell you a custom Land Rover Defender.
• But Twisted’s vehicles are far more expensive, starting at $250,000. 
• This is because the company uses all-new parts and every vehicle comes with white-glove service.
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Vintage luxury Land Rover Defenders built for the rich and famous — or at least the rich — are sort of like home renovations for car collectors and enthusiasts: Many buyers want them, many companies offer them, and a lot of money goes into them.

One such company is Twisted Automotive, which slaps a $250,000 price tag on its version of the boxy icon that last left the US market in the 1990s. The price? Twisted says it’s fully warranted. 

Legendary fandom

It’s easy to understand the Defender fandom. Built as off-roaders meant for farms and the English countryside, Defenders were only exported to the United States between 1993 and 1997, making them ripe for popularity among fans and collectors. But their boxy looks and go-anywhere-ness were far too charming to give up on quite so easily.

In recent years, many independent custom Defender companies have sprung up to satisfy consumer appetite, especially since vintage trucks like the Ford Bronco and Jeep Grand Wagoneer are so in vogue right now. Places like Icon, Arkonik, Himalaya, Twisted — all offer their own takes on the truck at their own price points.

From the UK to Texas

Twisted Automotive.

Twisted North America offers vehicles based on both the Defender 90 and 110. Business Insider recently reviewed the Twisted NA-V8 90.

The Austin, Texas-based company’s take is different in a few ways. The company doesn’t actually restore old Defenders; it uses body panels and chassis built brand new, but to the original 1990s Defender spec. Then, it pops a General Motors V8 into the vehicle and personalizes the car to its customer both inside and out. 

With a $250,000 starting price, Twisted doesn’t need to say who its vehicles are for. The people who can afford to blow a quarter of a million dollars represent a pretty small niche of the market. But within those buyers, Twisted doesn’t want them to just be Defender fans — and by removing the character traits the more masochistic Defender fans love, like decades-old reliability and general rattiness, the company actively courts those who might not be Defender enthusiasts.

Twisted Automotive.

“I believe that the Defender shouldn’t just be for the enthusiast,” Tom Maxwell, Twisted North America’s CEO, said in an interview with Business Insider.

Maxwell wants to capture not only lifelong Defender fans, but also younger buyers who might not know what a Defender is. 

“A lot of our customers are younger,” Maxwell said. “They’re technology entrepreneurs, some fashion guys. My first customer was a 27-year-old chap from New York — just a really successful young businessman — who kind of knew what [a] Defender was, didn’t really know its heritage, but he wanted something that was cool and that he could drive every day.”

But broadening that appeal also comes with ironing out the Defender a bit.

The awfulness is the point no more

If you’ve driven an original, unrestored Defender, you’ll know it for what it is: loud, uncomfortable, poorly built, and slower than tree sap. This is because the original Defender wasn’t ever meant to be a luxury vehicle, much less one meant for luxury US buyers. And that’s what niche Defender fans love so much about them.

“In England, the need to go anywhere and do anything is not the same as it is in the US,” Maxwell said. “And what I mean by that is in England, if you have to go anywhere, it’s probably not going to take you more than four or five hours, and you’re probably going to get stuck in traffic. And all the roads are quite narrow. 

“The vehicle [didn’t] have to be comfortable for long distances originally, and it didn’t have to always have all the modern convenience features when they were building it for farmers and for the military and stuff like that.”

Whether you love it or hate it, the discomfort and lack of features is the truth of Defender ownership — “Defenderisms,” as Maxwell calls them.

Strangers to these “Defenderism” idiosyncrasies — strangers who have upwards of $250,000 to spend on one (1) vehicle — will likely not be sold on the idea of a rattly old truck with that will occasionally demand their elbow grease and mechanical know-how to get it running again.

Twisted Automotive.

“What we do is we iron out those problems,” Maxwell said. “Our customers are the customers that just want the truck to work, to be right the first time, and to have no hassle. That’s it.”

And what better powerplant is there than a General Motors V8 crate motor from a Chevrolet Corvette? Making literally hundreds of horsepower more than any original Defender, slow is not something anyone would accuse a Twisted vehicle of being.

Of course, Twisted’s vehicles can still do all the Defender stuff that made them so lovable in the first place — look great, off-road well, be generally charismatic — but the company just made the truck a more modern, usable, and daily-drivable vehicle. And fast. Twisted’s NA-V8 90 is fast.

But to really catapult the trucks into the luxury space, Twisted’s vision of a custom Defender takes things much, much further.

Justifying that $250,000 price tag

Kristen Lee

By its own definition, Twisted isn’t a Defender restorer, nor is it a resto-modder. 

Restorers and resto-modders, according to Maxwell, use all original parts, strip them down to the bare metal and then rebuild the whole thing, sometimes adding in new parts like an engine. 

The problem with this is that even if you are the greatest restorer known to the history of humanity, restoring original Defenders means you’re still toiling away on a vehicle that might have been sitting in a field for 25 years. 

“Somewhere, [there will be] inherent rust and rot within that panel,” Maxwell said. “Galvanic reactions and corrosion can happen. They happen from the inside outwards. So, you could really completely take that thing all the way down, but there could still be corrosion inside it.

“Over time, that’s why you see some of these vehicles have paint bubbling, rusting issues. Unless you completely cut the rust out and then re-weld metal in, there’s no way to remove the rust. [And] you can’t really do with doors and things like that.”

Everything on a Twisted vehicle is brand new. The company sources chassis and body panels from OEMs that build them from Land Rover’s original blueprints and specifications.

Kristen Lee

“They are Land Rover official parts, and that’s why we’re able to do what we do,” Maxwell said. “We don’t try and reuse the old. That, again, that’s why our price point is different.”

Maxwell thinks the price for his vehicles is very fair, by the way.

“We don’t nickel and dime on the promises we give,” he said. “We don’t advertise at $150,000 but by the time you get what you want, you’re at $200,000. To be frank, there’s no bullshit. It’s just, this is the truck.

“Some customers say, ‘Hey, can I have a lower spec?’ And, unfortunately, our sales team and I say no because we don’t want to sell a Twisted with that lower spec for less money. It’s not about the money. When we build one of these vehicles, frankly, it has to be a vehicle that I would drive, and the bare minimum is what we have in our base spec.”

On top of that, the majority of Twisted’s vehicles are built to order. 

It means a thorough customization process that takes place from beginning to end and includes aesthetic and tuning options that are really only limited to your own imagination. The whole thing takes about six months.

Kristen Lee

“I don’t really want to just sell a soulless black Defender 110 that nobody’s had any involvement with,” Maxwell said. “You’re not just buying the vehicle at the end of the day, you’re buying the process. You’re buying the ability to choose and pick your leather samples and your stitch color and if some elements are going to be soft touch. It really is a custom car built around you.”

It also means complete white-glove service.

Because trucks like the NA-V8 90 use GM crate motors, general service can be taken care of at a GM dealership or GM specialist. “The alterations that we make to the engine and how we fit the LT1 in the vehicle are all documented, and those are provided to the customer who can then provide that to the service center,” Maxwell said.

But if a customer accidentally damages their vehicle, for example, they can call Twisted directly to address it. 

“Each customer has a personal relationship with their vehicle or project manager, and that relationship doesn’t stop on the day we hand over the vehicle,” Maxwell said. “It continues all the way through the warranty period and beyond.

“It’s white-glove service. They have the telephone number. If there is a problem, they ring the number, we pick up the phone and say, ‘Where are you? We’re coming to get you.’ And we’ll recover the vehicle back to one of our build facilities, and we will solve the problem at our cost.”

Maxwell used a blown fuse as an example. Maybe the customer doesn’t have time to bring their vehicle in. If that’s the case, Twisted will fly one of its staffers out for the repair.

Twisted Automotive.

No matter which way you look at it, $250,000 is a steep price to pay for any car. But to have it so personalized to suit your own taste is a rare and neat opportunity. Companies like Rolls-Royce and Bentley offer similar services.

If you aren’t scared off by a quarter of a million-dollar starting price, though, Rolls-Royces and Bentleys are probably a pretty common sight in your neighborhood anyway. With a Twisted product, you’d be picking up something different.