Ben Oliver writes about cars and the car industry for newspapers and magazines around the world: his favourite assignment saw him drive a standard Mini to the highest place a car can go, the 18,000ft Khardung La pass in the Indian Himalayas. Ben also writes about technology, travel and watches and runs a business in the film industry.

It is hard to imagine a more Boisdale car than the Ineos Grenadier. It was conceived in and named after another Belgravia drinking hole, in this case the Grenadier pub owned by Sir Jim Ratcliffe: founder of the Ineos chemicals group, part-owner of Manchester United and occasionally Britain’s richest man. The pub also lends its name to the Ineos Grenadiers, Sir Jim’s all-conquering professional cycling team.

Like Boisdale and much of its clientele, the Ineos Grenadier revels in wilful idiosyncrasy and iconoclasm, rejecting the engineering orthodoxy which has sucked the life and character out of other modern cars. And, like Boisdale, it is rural by inclination, if largely urban by location: it was designed to be bought and used by farmers, adventurers, field sports enthusiasts and the horsey set, even if most will be confined to town.

The story of the Grenadier’s genesis is as unusual as its design. Sir Jim loved the original Land Rover Defender, and, when its maker announced that it would kill it off in 2015, he tried to buy the tooling to keep it in production. Land Rover refused, not wishing to distract attention from the modern reinterpretation of the Defender it has since launched. Irked, Sir Jim responded as only a billionaire can, deciding to establish his own carmaker after few pints in his own pub.

Land Rover then objected to the Grenadier’s design, claiming in court that it was too close to that of the outgoing Defender. The litigation which ensued (and the pandemic) meant that the Grenadier wasn’t launched until early 2024. The bankruptcy of a major supplier then forced Ineos to suspend production for months, and the uncertainty over tariffs has disrupted its introduction to the US, easily its biggest market. Put all this together and the car first conceived a decade ago is only now hitting its stride.

Despite his other responsibilities, Sir Jim was very hands-on during its design and testing, and he has made the car he always wanted. The question is, does anyone else? The Grenadier has a deliberately archaic chassis, suspension and steering design: more capable and largely unbreakable off-road, but leaving it with somewhat agricultural manners on-road, where it will spend the vast majority of its time.

Traditionalists will rejoice in its resolutely unelectrified drivetrain: the Grenadier uses a 3.0-litre BMW straight six in either petrol or diesel, driving all four wheels (of course) through an eight-speed automatic gearbox and up to three differential locks for extreme off-roading. Don’t worry if you don’t know what a differential lock is: despite Sir Jim’s intentions, most Grenadier owners won’t know either, and I suspect they will never touch those particular switches.

From the outside, you can see why Land Rover objected. Rather than employ a conventional car designer, Sir Jim gave the job to Toby Ecuyer, the designer of his yachts. The resulting exterior is upright, functional and rectilinear: not conventionally handsome, but certainly not the amorphous blob too many modern cars become when their makers prioritise aerodynamic and energy efficiency.

Ecuyer’s contrarian approach works better inside. Here the modern, Tesla-led trend towards controlling most of a car’s functions via a massive touchscreen has been rejected in favour of banks of chunky rocker switches designed to be operated in gloves, redolent of a military helicopter. They even extend to a panel in the roof. No first-time passenger will climb aboard (and it is a climb) without commenting on them.

For a product from a new carmaker, the Grenadier feels remarkably well-made, as if its maker has been doing this for years. And that’s because it has.

Sir Jim isn’t daft, and although the design idiosyncrasies of the Grenadier are all his, he drafted in experts to build it. Austrian firm Magna-Steyr, which builds the mighty G-Class for Mercedes-Benz did the engineering, and the Grenadier is assembled in a former Mercedes plant in Alsace, explaining the entwined British and French flags on the exterior. The doors close with a pleasingly mechanical, very 1980s clunk-click, and the feel inside is more premium-utilitarian rather than pure luxury: think Belstaff motorcycle jackets, a company Sir Jim also owns.

Although it is technically and legally a passenger car, those agricultural underpinnings mean that, to drive, the Grenadier feels less like a conventional car than anything else on the road. Everybody comments on the steering: the turning circle is so large that parking is more akin to bringing a destroyer around, with a similar number of turns of the tiller required. The diesel engine is gruffly audible (but those who despair at the electrification of the car will welcome that) and the ride is surprisingly comfortable, especially at speed, if only because the Grenadier’s weight crushes all below it.

For all its flaws, I adore it. It can boast what too many modern cars lack: character, idiosyncrasy and a sense of itself. And, having driven it extensively across the great estates of the Highlands, I can attest that its on-road compromises at least deliver unstoppable off-road abilities, matching the rock-crawling abilities of the original Defender which inspired it.

When the Grenadier was first launched, cynics questioned Sir Jim’s aim of such a Marmite vehicle finding 30,000 customers per year, but his seemingly contrarian approach may turn out to be prescient. Old-school off-roaders like the Grenadier have not been swept away by the rising tide of bland Chinese EVs, as some feared they might.

Quite the opposite. The new Defender has been a riotous success: it is Land Rover’s biggest-seller by a country mile, accounting for nearly a third of its 375 000 annual production, and the lion’s share of last year’s £2.5bn profit, the company’s best in ten years. The Mercedes G-Class, meanwhile, is recording its best quarterly sales in its 46-year history and has been outselling the S-class in the US.

BMW is the latest carmaker to develop a proper mud-plugger, due to appear in 2029 and its first since the 1930s. The Toyota Land Cruiser had a recent retro reboot, and even the Chinese carmakers are getting involved: the Great Wall Tank and Yangwang U8 are both proper off-roaders with a similar, old-school body-on-frame construction to the Grenadier. The U8 can even swim.

The Grenadier doesn’t need to capture much of this growing market to be success. Polarising design and engineering are an advantage when you only need a small percentage of the market to love it enough to buy it, as is a brand which only makes proper, rugged off-roaders and isn’t seen on hatchbacks. There’s an electric sibling to the Grenadier planned, to be launched when demand for EVs recovers.

Until then, Sir Jim’s “eff-you” to Land Rover will continue to win customers at a surprising rate. I suspect that more than a few of them will be Boisdale regulars.