No More Soft Stuff: Ineos Grenadier 4X4 To Arrive This Year

Pros: Old-school, no-nonsense practicality meets comfortable ride, BMW power and unstoppable off-road ability.

Cons: Fiddly details, cabin storage space, slow and vague steering.

Competes with: Jeep Wrangler Rubicon, Ford Bronco, Mercedes-Benz G-Class, Land Rover Defender.

The world of off-roaders has evolved into the world of comfort-focused SUVs, and start-up automaker Ineos is banking that plenty of people want to turn back the clock with its all-new Grenadier 4X4…

… But not turn it back far enough that they miss out on high-tech, reliable engines, one of the all-time great automatic transmissions and terrific ride quality.

Ineos, founded by petrochemical billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, set out to make a modern interpretation of a no-nonsense, hard-core, robust, multi-use 4X4 in a shape and style abandoned even by its originator, Land Rover.

And it has, but in a modernized way.

As a first effort, the Grenadier is a remarkable piece of development, delivering a solidly no-nonsense vibe, massively strong mechanical pieces and a somewhat disjointed, slightly disfunctional interior.

The significant, hefty parts of the Grenadier work remarkably well for a vehicle conceived in Great Britain, developed in Germany and built in France, but there are parts of the cabin that feel like they were either low priorities or not thought through. Thankfully, they are generally smaller issues and fast adjustments to make.

Pricing for the US-spec Ineos Grenadiers will be available in the second half of this year, along with the US-spec aftermarket equipment, but Ineos is aiming for a number around the $50,000 MSRP mark, plus or minus a few thousand dollars.

That would put it above the Jeep Wrangler Renegade and the Ford Bronco, below the Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen and more or less on top of the car that replaced its spirit animal, the Land Rover Defender.

At Its Core

Mechanically, the Ineos Grenadier 4X4 mates a wonderfully rigid ladder-frame chassis (made by Germany’s Gestamp) with two solid-beam axles (made by Italian farm-equipment specialist Carraro) and permanent all-wheel drive.

The extra slippery scenarios are met via a two-speed Tremec transfer case and up to three lockable Eaton differentials (but for the base models, it just one in the center) and an old-school steering box takes care of where you point it. Sort of.

Inside all of this, Ineos fits a re-tuned BMW-sourced 3.0-liter, turbocharged gasoline engine with 282 horsepower and 332lb-ft of torque, mated to an off-road tuned ZF eight-speed automatic transmission with off-road tuning.

By US standards, it’s not a huge SUV, sitting at 192.7 inches long and 80.7 inches high, on a 115-inch wheelbase that is good for just two rows of seats, for a maximum of five people.

There is a longer cab-chassis version on the way, so people can still seat five people, but attach custom bodywork on the back for custom jobs. And that’s likely to be heavier than the Grenadier’s 5732lb.

No Frills, No Nonsense

Ratcliffe saw a world being stripped of its no-nonsense 4X4s in favor of high-refinement, low-capability urban soft roaders; none of which he fancied driving.

So he built a machine so no-nonsense that you get the feeling the Ineos Grenadier would be happy to live its life off the blacktop completely.

Ineos says the Grenadier has 10.4 inches of ground clearance, can tilt to 45 degrees (we saw a maximum of 42) and delivers nine degrees of front axle articulation and 12 degrees at the rear.

It has 23 inches of wheel travel, too (a subject of much debate internally during the Grenadier’s formative months), combined with a 35.5-degree approach angle, a 36.1-degree departure angle and a 28.2-degree ramp-over angle.

That puts it ahead of the vaunted Mercedes-Benz G-Class and the Jeep Wrangler Rubicon Unlimited, but just behind the Jeep on ground clearance by a half inch.

There is a long list of optional tires developed for the Grenadier, but the standard offerings are either a 265/70 R17 Bridgestone Dueler all-terrain or 255/70 R18s as an option. There’s also a Bridgestone 3PMSF (three peak, mountain snowflake) winter tire (which we made use of in Scotland) and the robust BF Goodrich K02.

BMW squeezes 380hp and 398lb-ft out of this B58 in-line six for the X5, but Ineos asked for it to be re-tuned for more torque down low, with less concern for the power peak, and it also uses a much longer, more forgiving throttle response.

That’s why it has “only” 282hp from 3250pm to 4200rpm and 332lb-ft from 1250 to 4000rpm, and takes 8.6 seconds to hit 62mph, instead of the 5.4 seconds in the X5 xDrive40i.

Combine that with the 2.5:1 low-range ratio in the Tremec transfer case and the Grenadier crawls at 1.26mph.

Even if things get a bit steep for the compression ratio in the B58, there is a hill-descent control, activated by a ceiling-mounted button, that can hold things down to just 2mph, and can be adjusted on the cruise control’s buttons.

The base version of the Grenadier uses only a locking center differential, while the Trailmaster has a more robust off-road focus, delivering three diff locks and a snorkel air intake, while the Fieldmaster is more luxury focused, with heated seats and leather trim.

It also wades through 31.5 inches of water (or whatever other fluid takes your fancy), which isn’t bad for a spark-ignition motor.

The biggest query we have on the entire mechanical package is the old-fashioned recirculating ball steering box.

Ineos insists this is necessary to cope with the nine degree of front-axle articulation, which no rack-and-pinion system could manage. Besides, it’s tough and easy to fix if something goes wrong with it in a remote location.

And, off-road, it works just fine. But life isn’t just off-road, not these days.

Inside Issues

Great thing off road, the Ineos Grenadier may be, but living with the Grenadier is a different matter. Its interior is comfortable, without being thoroughly thought through, with some notable omissions and oversights.

There is a laundry list of things we’d have like Ineos to do differently inside the Grenadier, and it starts with the steering wheel.

It’s a two-spoke wheel, and with 3.85 turns lock-to-lock from the steering and virtually no feel from the front end of the 4X4, it’s hard to intuitively get a feel for where you have the front wheels pointed.

This would easily be solved with a three-spoke wheel, but Ineos hasn’t even homologated one.

There are other issues, too. Ineos has a simple warning screen in front of the driver, with everything else, including the speed readout, on the high-mounted 12.3-inch touchscreen in the center of the short dashboard. For a simple off-roader, some things take a lot of touching to get to, including four touches to dim the instrument lights.

There is a large central storage box but in front of that there is just a pair of cupholders and nowhere else worth the name to leave anything. There is a pad in front of the driver on the dash, but it’s too slippery to keep anything there, and too hot in summer.

There are other areas where a lack of clear planning has been evident, including a door grip that doubles as a storage area, but has a hard-plastic bottom, so anything in there rattles around.

There are grab handles in the front to climb in, but not in the rear, which may be a problem. The surprising thing is that they had them on the prototypes we drove last year, and now they’re not even an option.

A bigger problem, which Ineos promised to go and fix before cars go on sale in the US, is that the windscreen washers and wipers combined to clean the screen with dreadful results, and that was just on snowy roads. Any thick mud doesn’t bear thinking about, and it needs more nozzles or stronger wiper springs or both.

There are old-school dials to control the climate, and that’s welcome because it’s easy to use and intuitive, as are the steering wheel-mounted switches and indicators.

Not so easy to run is the collection of roof-mounted switches and buttons for the off-road systems like the hill-descent control and the lockable diffs, though that’s not all the fault of the hardware.

Ineos could have fitted confirmation sensors inside the diffs, to confirm they’d locked in, but they chose to use the wheel-speed sensors that were already in play because of the ABS and the ESC (after all, they work find for the hill-descent control).

But the car refuses to believe the diffs are locked, or unlocked, until you’ve made the wheels slip enough to detect a difference in wheel speed, and that’s not always practical.

It means you can’t get into trouble and then lock the diffs, because the car won’t believe you if you can’t make one wheel spin faster than the other.

There’s also a fiddly fault where you have to hold a button in for a second, then release it and push it again to confirm that you did, actually, want to do that.

The roof buttons also have a relatively small typeface, which makes them difficult to read for people over a certain age.

There are also eight pre-engineered switches, ranging from 10Amps to 500Amps, so people can simply connect their accessories and they’re ready to use.

Driving On Road

The first surprise – though it shouldn’t have been – on the Ineos Grenadier was its drive-line sophistication.

There is a wonderful serenity that comes with driving something so very new, but with such sophistication from the engine, transmission and differentials.

The engine is lower revving than in a BMW, and that really doesn’t matter here, because you know it’s not a sporty machine in any way.

The second pleasant surprise is the ride quality. The progressive-rate springs mean the Grenadier comes with astonishing compliance, easing the tyres down into bumps so you know they’re there, but they’re never unpleasant.

It rides more like a Range Rover than a Defender (even a new one), and that core competence doesn’t change whether the Grenadier is crossing urban potholes or bouncing up rutted mountain-goat passes.

It’s also strong enough to take the Grenadier effortlessly up any gradient you point it at, with a minimum of fuss.

The 4X4’s mechanical package has a way of just doing things so that they get done without stressing the driver at all, even when the diff locks don’t lock in, which we found at one point, as it eased its tires down into the holes and refused to bounce on the way out again.

The steering is an issue on-road, though, and that’s irksome. It feels like you are aiming the Grenadier with no more precision than tossing gas by hand. It also doesn’t like to self-center, and it’s very unhelpful on narrow roads. Mechanically, it’s by far the worst of the package, but you’d have to ask yourself if that’s worth the off-road trade.

Conclusion

There is so much to like about the Ineos Grenadier and even more to respect.

As a first effort, Ineos has not tried to reinvent the wheel, but has gone to people who know these things for all the core-critical pieces.

And the core-critical pieces work, and work well.

There is a laundry-list of ancillary pieces that don’t work so well, though, and that’s disappointing.

It’s like they got all the tough questions right and flunked on too many easy ones.

Fortunately, few of the easy mistakes are difficult, time consuming or expensive to fix, and they should be fixed before the vehicles reach our shores.