The all-new 2020 Land Rover Defender may not have been a mystery, but the date of its debut was. That is, until now. Land Rover today announced the new Defender will be revealed at the 2019 Frankfurt Motor Show on September 10.
To celebrate the occasion, years in the making, Land Rover will be taking the new Defender on a road trip from the Valley of the Castles in Kazakhstan all the way to Frankfurt, Germany, a trek of nearly 4,000 miles, depending on the route, according to Google Maps.
With the stunt, Land Rover aims to show how much research and development went into the new Defender, and prove to skeptics it will be as capable as its legendary predecessor was. Reports of Land Rover altering the previous Defender’s spartan, all-business ethos with luxuries found in the rest of the Land Rover lineup have rankled some fans.
In making its case for the new Defender, Land Rover says the prototypes endured testing in temperatures as low as -40 degrees and as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit, and at elevations as of 10,000 feet, a regimen familiar to most new vehicle testing teams. The company also employed Defender prototypes for real-world applications, such as supporting wildlife conservation charity, Tusk, in Africa and the International Federation of Red Cross and the Red Crescent Societies, in Dubai.
Land Rover will livestream the Defender’s global reveal on its Facebook and YouTube channels, after which order books for the new model will be open.