Every once in a while a truck comes along that makes grown men stop scrolling and just stare at the screen for a minute. The new Defender OCTA is one of those machines. On November 26, 2025, the editors at Top Gear handed it the “Best Off-Roader” trophy for 2025, and if you’ve been paying attention, this one didn’t come as a surprise. It feels more like the rest of the industry finally caught up and admitted what a lot of us already suspected: the OCTA is operating on a different level.
This isn’t some stripped-down rock crawler with a roll cage and a dream. This is the flagship Defender, the one that sits at the very top of the lineup, and it’s loaded in all the ways that matter. Under that aggressive hood lives a 4.4-liter twin-turbo mild-hybrid V8 good for 635 horsepower. Zero to sixty happens in 3.8 seconds. Let that sink in for a second, a big, boxy, honest-to-goodness off-road truck that can out-accelerate most sports cars from ten years ago. Yet the OCTA never forgets what a Defender is supposed to do when the pavement ends.
Top Gear’s judges called it “next-level off-road prowess,” and they weren’t just being polite. The truck gets an exclusive OCTA mode in the Terrain Response 2 system that basically tells the truck, “We’re not playing nice anymore.” Pair that with the new hydraulically interlinked 6D Dynamics suspension, an air-sprung setup that can lean into corners like a rally car while still giving you almost 12 inches of wheel travel, and you start to understand why testers keep running out of adjectives.
Jethro Bovingdon, one of Top Gear’s lead testers, summed it up after throwing an OCTA down a rally stage:
“The Defender OCTA looks fantastic, feels quality and manages to have a really appealing sense of fun without tripping over into contrived nonsense. It also has a thumping 4.4-litre twin turbo V8 that performs brilliantly. Point it along something akin to a rally stage and it’s magic, soaking up yumps, powering sideways out of every turn and feeling like an all-powerful conquering force.”
That quote hits home because most of us who love this stuff have spent years choosing between raw capability and on-road manners. The old rule was you could have one or the other, never both. The OCTA throws that rule out the window and backs up over it a few times just to make sure.
Land Rover put the truck through absolute hell before anyone ever turned a key in anger. We’re talking over 13,960 extra tests on top of the regular Defender program. They beat on prototypes in the desert, in the Arctic, on proving grounds most of us will never see. Every weld, every bushing, every line of code got questioned. The result is a vehicle that can wade almost three feet of water, climb 45-degree slopes, and still hustle down a twisting back road without feeling like it’s about to tip over at the first corner.
Amy Gibson, UK Brand Director for Defender, said it best after the award came in:
“To receive this award in OCTA’s first year of sales is a powerful endorsement of our vision for Defender. OCTA is a modern-day hero, unstoppable, uncompromising, and engineered to dominate the extremes.”
And that’s exactly what it feels like behind the wheel. It’s not subtle. The supercharged growl from those twin turbos, the way the whole truck squats and launches when you mat the throttle, the sheer presence it has sitting still; none of it is subtle. But it never feels cartoonish. There’s a quality to the way everything works together that reminds you this is still a Defender at its core. It just happens to be the fastest, most powerful, most capable Defender anyone has ever built.
The rest of the Defender family hasn’t been ignored either. You can still get the classic 90, the do-everything 110, or the long-wheelbase 130 that’ll seat eight without breaking a sweat. There’s even a plug-in hybrid 110 for the guys who want to quiet the neighbors on the way to the job site. Commercial customers haven’t been forgotten; the Hard Top versions are ready for whatever the workday throws at them. But the OCTA? That one is the no-compromise king, the truck you buy when you refuse to choose between luxury and real-world toughness.
Seventy-five years after the original Series I Land Rover rolled out, the Defender bloodline is stronger than ever. The brand still partners with the Red Cross, Red Crescent, and Tusk Trust, still gets dirty doing real work in places most of us only see on television. Only now it can do all of that and then smoke a Porsche off the line on the way home.
If you’ve ever owned an old Defender, you know the feeling: part tractor, part tank, all character. The OCTA takes that same spirit, wraps it in cutting-edge engineering, and hands you the keys with a grin. Top Gear just confirmed what a lot of us already knew in our gut; right now, there simply isn’t a better all-around off-road machine on the planet.
And for the men who’ve spent decades turning wrenches, chasing horizons, and building things with their hands, that’s saying something.
