Inevitably, cruise control had barely established itself as the must-have option on vehicles in the USA when one of the manufacturers was hit with a writ: some bloke had picked up his Winnebago, settled onto some arrow-straight highway at 55mph, set the cruise control… and then gone into his kitchen to make some coffee.
True story…
It’s just as well, then, that it’s not easily possible to climb between the seats of a Defender, although we have actually fitted coffee machines for some of our customers.
Anyway, we’ve developed cruise control for original or aftermarket fitment on Twisted Defenders.
The system, priced at £895, takes a day to fit as an aftermarket item. It is operated by a stalk system, and is entirely intuitive and familiar to anyone who has used cruise control. Cruise control is not an auto-pilot, as our Winnebago-ist seemed to believe….
The reason we’ve done this is that Twisted Defenders have considerably more mile-munching capability than standard cars for all sorts of reasons – performance, chassis dynamics, and because our soundproofing makes them much more refined places to be.
As a consequence, they become true distance cars because of those enhancements – and the one thing that was missing was that cruise control because nobody could ever previously contemplate a trans-continental trip in a standard model.
Our customers will often drive their Defenders across Europe to go ski-ing for instance – it’s a distance-cruiser en route, and virtually guarantees getting people and ski kit right to where they want to be, even if it’s half-way up an Alp.