The weekend brief was simple. Load up the INEOS Grenadier Black Edition, point it south from Sydney, cruise the Princes Highway down to Mollymook for Easter, and spend a few days doing absolutely nothing productive. Tennis, surfing, golf and steaks.
Which is exactly what happened, until we discovered the unsealed roads behind the property.
Not proper tracks. Still gazetted streets, technically, but the kind where the bitumen gave up a long time ago, and nobody came back to fix it. Rutted, uneven, washed out in places. The kind of surface that turns a regular SUV into a percussion instrument. It was, unexpectedly, the perfect place to find out what the Grenadier is actually built for.
A Billionaire’s Bar Napkin Sketch
The Grenadier exists because of a pub. Specifically, the Grenadier pub in London’s Belgravia, where INEOS founder Sir Jim Ratcliffe reportedly sketched out his vision for a proper utilitarian 4WD after Land Rover killed the old Defender. Ratcliffe, whose chemical empire makes him one of Britain’s richest men, thought the new Defender had gone soft.
So he built his own. The Grenadier launched globally in 2023 with a BMW-sourced 3.0-litre straight-six (available in petrol or diesel), a proper body-on-frame chassis, beam axles front and rear, and the kind of mechanical simplicity that would make a 1990s Toyota Land Cruiser nod approvingly. No air suspension. No fancy adaptive dampers. Just old-school engineering with modern reliability underpinning it.
The Black Edition is the moody one. Blacked-out grille, dark alloy wheels, black exterior accents. It looks like the Grenadier got dressed for a funeral and decided it quite liked the aesthetic.
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On The Highway: Honest, Not Like Your Normal SUV. But Who Wants Normal…
Let’s get this out of the way. The Grenadier is not an easy car to drive around Sydney. The steering is heavy at low speed. The turning circle is the kind of number you read and then read again, hoping you misunderstood. Parking it in Bondi on a Saturday morning would be an act of genuine hostility toward your own mental health. Doable, but does require muscles.
There’s no adaptive cruise control. No lane assist. None of the driver-assist creature comforts you’d get as standard in a Lexus LX, a BMW X5, or frankly anything else at this price point. It has cruise control, yes, but the adaptive stuff that makes highway driving feel semi-autonomous in 2026 simply isn’t here.
If you’ve grown used to a car that holds its lane and manages the gap to the vehicle ahead, the Grenadier will require a full recalibration of your attention span.
On the highway south, it settles into a rhythm, but it’s never going to feel like a Range Rover. There’s wind noise. You’re aware of the body sitting high above the road. It doesn’t so much carve through corners as politely negotiate with them.
The BMW-sourced six-cylinder is strong and willing, but this isn’t a car that flatters you into thinking you’re driving something sporty. It’s a tool. A very well-built, surprisingly comfortable tool, but a tool all the same.
Aviation Console, Roof Switches, Leather Everything
The cabin is where the Grenadier’s personality really declares itself. The centre console is pure aviation. Banks of clearly labelled toggle switches run down the middle, the kind of layout you’d expect in a helicopter cockpit, not an SUV. Then there are the auxiliary switches on the roof, which is one of those design choices that makes you grin every time you reach up to use them. It’s a cool detail in a car full of cool details.
The Black Edition gets leather throughout, and the interior feels genuinely luxurious in a way the utilitarian exterior doesn’t quite prepare you for. The seats are supportive, the materials feel premium, and there’s a solidity to every surface that suggests this thing was built to last decades, not model cycles.
What the Grenadier doesn’t have is pretence. The switches are chunky enough to operate with gloves on. The infotainment system, supplied by BMW, is perfectly adequate without being a centrepiece. Nobody is buying this car for the screen.
Where The Grenadier Actually Wakes Up
The unsealed roads behind the property changed everything. We weren’t in 4WD. We weren’t using diff locks or the low-range transfer case. We certainly weren’t winching ourselves out of creek crossings. This was, if we’re being honest, the yuppie’s version of four-wheel driving. Gravel roads through spotted gum forest with a nice Airbnb waiting at the end.
The Black Edition isn’t the full-blown off-road specification either, so we couldn’t test the complete suite of 4WD options available across the range. Admittedly, if I knew more about serious off-roading, I would have explored the drivetrain’s capabilities further. That’s a review for someone with more red dirt under their fingernails than me.
But even at this level, the Grenadier revealed its hand. The suspension, those beam axles that feel agricultural on the freeway, suddenly made complete sense. Where a modern Defender would be constantly recalibrating its air suspension and a LandCruiser would be working hard to keep things composed, the Grenadier just rolled through it.
A mate who came along for the weekend, a proper 4WD tragic who’s put serious hours into Defenders and LandCruisers, said something that stuck. “This is so much more comfortable than a Defender on this stuff.” He wasn’t talking about the seats or the cabin. He was talking about the way the whole car just absorbs terrain without ever feeling unsettled. It’s the difference between a suspension system trying to be clever and one that’s simply well-engineered.
Space: The Practical Stuff
The boxy shape pays dividends here. Golf clubs, tennis racquets, a surfboard, and weekend bags for Easter. It swallowed the lot without complaint. Drop the two rear seats and you’ve got a genuinely cavernous cargo area. It does all the things a large SUV should do, but the proportions and the flat load floor make it feel like it was designed by someone who actually loads cars, not someone who renders them.
Where I think this car would really come alive, beyond our weekend bush lane experiment, is on a farm. Gates to open, paddocks to cross, feed to carry, dogs to hose off the back. The Grenadier feels built for that life in a way that a new Defender, for all its capability, somehow doesn’t.
So, Is It Better Than A Defender?
Better than the old Defender? Without question. More comfortable, more capable, more refined in every measurable way. Better than the new Defender? That’s where it gets interesting. The new Defender is a more complete car. It drives better on road, has better tech, and offers a level of polish the Grenadier doesn’t attempt to match.
Better looking than a Range Rover? Probably not, if we’re being honest. More capable than a Land Cruiser? Possibly. The questions that remain, the ones nobody can answer yet, are the long-term ones. Reliability. Longevity. Service network. Resale. INEOS is a new car manufacturer, and those questions only get answered with years on the road and kilometres on the odometer.
But here’s the thing that surprised me most. It didn’t matter how many times I walked towards this car over the Easter weekend. Every single time, I stopped and looked at it and thought the same thing: this is a really, really cool car.
The Black Edition, with every element murdered out, only amplifies that feeling. Personally, I’d go for a green one with a black interior, because I’m obsessed with green and I think it would look staggering against the Australian bush. But the Black Edition makes a statement that’s hard to argue with.
The One I’d Actually Order
INEOS doesn’t just make the station wagon we drove. There’s a cab chassis for people who actually work for a living, and then there’s the Quartermaster, the dual-cab ute version that might be the coolest workhorse on sale in Australia right now. Even the name is bang on. Very 007.
If I’m spending my own money, it’s a Quartermaster in green with a black interior. No hesitation. There’s something about that combination, the utilitarian shape, the tray out back, the military colour palette, that just works. It would look like it was built for the Australian bush because, in many ways, it was.
The Quartermaster takes everything that makes the Grenadier cool and adds genuine versatility. Surfboards in the tray. A dog crate. A couple of hay bales if you’re living that regional life. It’s the version of this car that makes the most sense for anyone who wants capability and character without pretending they need a seven-seat luxury SUV.
DMARGE’s Two Cents
The INEOS Grenadier Black Edition is not a car for everyone, and it knows it.
If you live in the inner city and your idea of rough terrain is the speed bump outside Woolworths, this is a terrible purchase. If you need adaptive cruise control and lane assist for your daily commute, look elsewhere.
But if you actually use a 4WD as a 4WD, even occasionally, even at the mild, gravel-road, nice-Airbnb level that we tested it at, the Grenadier makes a compelling case for itself. The more we drove the car the more we liked it. Yes, it’s heavy, and somewhat cumbersome in the city but that’s the whole point. And people everywhere stop and stare at the thing. Which is tres cool.
It’s honest in a way that very few cars are in 2026. It doesn’t try to be a sports car. It doesn’t try to be a luxury lounge. It just does the job it was designed for, and does it exceptionally well.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe sketched this thing on the back of a napkin because he thought the car industry had forgotten what a proper 4WD was supposed to be. Based on a weekend down south, he might have had a point.
