You can now spec your £250,000 classic Land Rover Defender to match your 2026 Octa
It was only a matter of time before the six-figure classic Defenders started offering Octa-esque options
Like a person in the throes of a midlife crisis taking a crack at wearing more youthful, trendier clothes, Land Rover offering Octa-inspired options on the reborn Classic V8 Defender was almost an inevitability. And so it’s come to pass, with new colours and trim options joining the spec list, allowing you to spec a Land Rover restomod to match your brand new Octa. The rub of course is that the restored, upgraded old car costs ny on a square £100,000 more than the brand new, 6D hydraulic suspension- and twin-turbo V8-equipped Defender Octa.
Five exterior colours are coming from the Octa colour palette to join the options list for a Classic Defender V8. These include Octa-exclusive colours like Petra Copper, Faroe Green and Sargasso Blue, as well as Narvik Black, Patagonia White, Borasco Grey (the familiar launch colour and the colour of our Fast Fleet long-termer), Carpathian Grey and Charente Grey.
On the inside you can now get Octa-inspired lightweight Ultrafabric trim in Khaki Green Light Cloud and Lunar. That’s if you don’t option the semi-aniline leather in Burnt Sienna, or Ebony to match the spec of your Octa Black.
The Octa might be the modern, high-performance Defender that frankly runs rings around the Classic V8 for which you’ll pay £100k more, it does do some things better. For instance, customisability. Where the Octa is only available as a 110, the Classic V8 can be had in 90, 110 station wagon and indeed the most recently-introduced Soft Top form.
Revealed earlier in 2025, the V8 Soft Top is ostensibly an old-school Defender 90 to which Land Rover has taken the sheers. Being Land Rover Classic, the job is a little more involved than that, with a top-to-bottom recommissioning and restoration of a 2012-2016 Defender, to a customer’s exact specification, for a price starting at £234,000.
Canvas roof colour options include black, sand, dark khaki and navy. The hood is an all-new bespoke design to ensure a ‘perfect fit’. There’s also a smaller ‘bikini hood’, as pictured here, for partial cabin protection from the elements. If Solihull made a Porsche Boxster Spyder… Based on the design of the last convertible Defender, which ended production in 2016, the full hood features extra tie-down points for more high-speed security.
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The side and rear sections can be unzipped and rolled up without removing the whole thing, for a part-alfresco Defender driving experience without betting fully on a sunny, rain-free day. There’s a pretty substantial roll bar behind the driver and passenger to ensure occupant safety in the event things go diff-up.
The Octa powertrain does not join the Octa-inspired options list for the Classic V8, though that may be a bad thing. Less powerful it may be but the 410bhp, 379lb ft naturally aspirated version of the now mostly retired 5-litre V8 engine is enormously emotive. Driving a Classic V8 and puppeting that engine with your right foot is an almost laugh-out-loud experience. It is sans supercharger because fitting one is an impossibility in terms of packaging and cooling, plus 0-62mph in 5.9sec is quite enough in an old Defender.
As a reminder, the rest of the car is just about upgraded to meet the extra potency. Big Alcon brakes (335mm front, 300mm rear) are clamped by four-piston calipers; suspension upgrades include Eibach coil springs and anti-roll bars paired with Bilstein dampers; and the steering rack features the power steering system from the P38 Range Rover for improved ease and response. The result as we've found in our testing, is an old Defender with 410bhp that's less frightening and more fun.
