There’s a particular genre of television that finds you once you become a father in your forties: dad TV. Stoic men of few words make hard decisions in vast landscapes. Problems are solved with grit, silence and the occasional well-placed stare. Much of it comes courtesy of someone such as Taylor Sheridan, and if you spend enough time in that world, something curious begins to happen.
You begin to think you should know how to fix things. That you should be able to read a landscape, to drive across it and survive it. You start to imagine, however faintly, what your role might be if the world tilted off its axis. And, inevitably, you begin to think about the kind of car that version of you would drive.
If you were building a vehicle for the end of days – or at least for the version of yourself that believes it might be coming – it would look something like the Ineos Grenadier Trialmaster x LeTech model.
It is an extreme off-road variant of the standard Grenadier, which it should be said, is no softie. The vehicle trades unapologetically in the visual language of the great off-roaders – the Land Rover Defender and the Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen chief among them – borrowing their boxy silhouettes and their implied promise of dominion over the natural world. There is a romance to that form, one that suggests capability first, with comfort lurking somewhere further down the list.
But what’s striking is that the Grenadier isn’t just a tribute act. Spend time with it and it reveals itself as something more self-assured and less nostalgic than its influences might suggest. It doesn’t so much reference the past as reassert a set of values that have largely disappeared from modern car design.
For example, while the car is comfortable, it does not coddle you. This is not a vehicle that flatters you on the motorway. At 140kph, it feels noisy, upright and faintly resistant to the idea that it should be there at all. But to judge it on those terms is to misunderstand the brief entirely.
The Grenadier has not been engineered for smooth tarmac and long-haul cruising. Everything about it – from its ladder-frame chassis and solid beam axles on the standard model (and the portal axle kit on the LeTech) to its permanent four-wheel drive and locking differentials – is optimised for what happens when the road runs out.
Off-road, both versions come authoritatively into their own. The standard car feels unflustered over loose sand and broken terrain, its long suspension travel soaking up punishment without fuss. There is a mechanical honesty to the way it moves – you feel the weight, the grip, the articulation – but it never feels overwhelmed. It encourages a more deliberate kind of driving. In rocky terrain or steep inclines, it leans into its engineering: low-range gearing, robust underpinnings and the sense that it has been built to endure.
Then there is the LeTech version, which takes that baseline and pushes it into something far more extreme. Developed with German off-road specialists, it introduces portal axles that dramatically increase ground clearance, effectively lifting the car without compromising suspension geometry.
The result is a vehicle that can traverse obstacles that would stop most SUVs cold – deeper ruts, sharper rocks more aggressive inclines. Add to that a lifted suspension set-up, reinforced components, larger all-terrain tyres and a visual stance that borders on the militaristic, and you begin to understand why the model’s website has to specify that it is “road legal”.
Where the standard car is capable, the LeTech is made for the hardened enthusiast. It is built for the kind of terrain most owners will never fully explore, but that’s beside the point. Its existence reinforces the idea that the Grenadier platform is designed with headroom – that there is always more it can do.
The story behind it only reinforces that sense of purpose. Jim Ratcliffe, the founder of Ineos, is not, on paper, a car manufacturer. He is, however, one of Britain’s wealthiest industrialists, with interests spanning everything from petrochemicals to sport – including stakes in the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team and Manchester United FC.
When Land Rover announced the end of the original Defender, Ratcliffe reportedly tried to acquire the tooling to keep it alive. Refused, he opted for the more ambitious route: to build a spiritual successor from the ground up.
That intent is visible in the details. Open the bonnet and the BMW-sourced engine sits within a bay that feels accessible. The thinking is simple – if something goes wrong, you should be able to reach in and fix it yourself. It’s a philosophy that extends into the cabin, where physical switches dominate the dash and an overhead console adds a faintly aviation-like aura. It is tactile, deliberate and refreshingly analogue in a market that has largely defaulted to glass screens and haptic guesswork.
There is, too, a sense that the car is designed to be personalised to a degree that most modern vehicles discourage. Mounting points run along its body, inviting modification and addition. The LeTech version – lifted, armoured and visually unmissable – pushes that idea to its logical extreme, a reminder that the Grenadier is less a finished product than a platform for a certain kind of life.
And it is here that the car feels well-suited to the UAE. This is a place where overlanding is not a niche hobby, but a weekend ritual – where convoys head out towards the dunes of Al Badayer or the desert beyond Liwa, where the idea of self-sufficiency still carries weight. The Grenadier fits neatly into that culture. Not as a luxury object, but as a tool that understands the landscape it’s being dropped into. It has the range, the durability and, crucially, the character to feel at home in a place where you can veer off the road and into adventure.
Of course, this level of apocalypse-ready engineering does not come cheap. The standard Grenadier already starts at Dh268,000 for the Station Wagon and Dh345,000 for the QuarterMaster, but the LeTech conversion is in another category entirely. While we were not given exact UAE pricing, when Ineos announced the modified version in Europe, prices started at €170,000 (Dh735,000).
The most telling moment during my time with the car came, unexpectedly, on an ordinary stretch of road by the beach in Dubai. A restored 1970s Defender driven by an older gentleman in a crisp kandura approached from the opposite direction. As we passed, the driver glanced across, paused and offered a small, approving nod. It felt, in its own quiet way, like a benediction.
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