Does the Land Rover Defender Trophy live up to its name?
July 23, 2025 by Mario Christou
Car changing is a big deal
Senior reviews writer Mario Christou spent a day testing the new Land Rover Defender Trophy in its natural habitat to find out if it’s worthy of the name
Show of hands, are you considering a Land Rover Defender as your next car? Keep your hands up if you plan on taking it off-roading.
If you’ve got yours down, don’t worry – you’re not alone. The Defender shed its agricultural image when it was reinvented into its current guise, and it became an outstanding family car in the process.
But where some off-roaders have become soft, road-only family SUVs over the years, the Defender hasn’t lost its incredible off-road ability. That’s why I decided to see what the new Defender Trophy could do when subjected to a deep-forest off-road trail.
Trophy is a new trim level for 2025, and it harks back to the iconic Camel Trophy challenge; adventurers travelled the world in sand-yellow Land Rovers to prove that they were as tough as the cars they were slinging through knee-deep mud and rainforests.
The new Defender Trophy certainly looks the part, in Sandglow yellow paint with blacked-out trims and a set of achingly cool alloys on knobbly tyres – with small round holes and a convex design, mimicking the steel wheels of those classic models. You can opt for yours in a military-eque shade of green, too.
When parked next to an old Defender in Camel livery, there’s certainly a strong resemblance.
Point its bluff, gloss black front end in the direction of a road less travelled and it becomes immediately clear that the Trophy is a highly capable off-road machine. It remained comfortable over the roughest surfaces I subjected it to, handled steep banks and axle-testing dips with ease and positively skipped over heavily rutted tracks.
The thing is, I also drove a regular Defender hybrid around an even tougher course on the same day, and it was just as impressive as the Trophy. It teetered in the air on two wheels, held a steady speed down hugely steep banks and never once felt out of its depth.
It begs the question, why pay extra for the Trophy edition? It offers very little over the standard Defender. Even the butch visual additions such as the roof rack, storage boxes, mud flaps and snorkel are all part of a £5,000 option pack, but even without it the Trophy costs over £20,000 more than a regular Defender.
If you’re after a big nostalgia hit and a way to stand out against the all-black Defenders prowling the streets of London, the Defender Trophy is a good way to turn heads – so long as you don’t mind your bank account having a little cry in the process.
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