Land Rover is holding a special exhibition to celebrate 67 years of building rugged off-roaders like the Series I, II, and III models, and the Defender. The event will take place at auction house Bonham’s headquarters on New Bond Street in London, England.
The exhibition will showcase iconic Land Rovers from the past seven decades, including an early Series I and a Series III. However, the headline-grabbing off-roader is a one-off model named Defender 2,000,000 that was built over a ten-day period just a few months ago. The model’s name reflects the production milestone of 2 million Series Land Rover and Defenders.
The company invited 33 brand ambassadors — notably adventurers, collectors, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists — to its Solihull, England, factory and asked them to install a few components on the unique Defender.
Based on the a short-wheelbase 90 station wagon model, the 2,000,000 wears a two-tone silver and black paint job accented by gloss black components such as the grille, the door hinges, the mirrors, and the fender flares. Black alloy wheels and a unique “No. 2,000,000” emblem on the back emphasize the custom look, but the finishing touch is a map of Red Wharf Bay engraved into an unpainted section of the left front fender. For those who need a refresher course in Land Rover history, Red Wharf Bay is a huge beach in Wales where an engineer named Maurice Wilks sketched what would become the Series I — the original Land Rover — into the sand in 1947 to give his brother an idea of what he wanted to bring to the market.
The cabin benefits from wall-to-wall leather upholstery and numerous machined aluminum bits and pieces that give the off-roader a more premium feel. Land Rover hasn’t made any mechanical modifications, meaning the special Defender carries on with a 2.2-liter four-cylinder turbodiesel mill that spins all four wheels via a manual transmission.
Want it? You’re in luck, because the Defender 2,000,000 will be auctioned off on December 16th, 2015. The proceeds from the sale will be donated to charities including the Born Free Foundation, a non-profit whose goal is to eliminate zoos and return the animals in them to their natural habitats, and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
