We’re often told that there are no bad cars any more. But there are plenty of bland cars, and they’re on the rise. The new breed of Chinese EVs are the worst offenders, with drivetrains, cabins and exterior styling so indistinguishable and interchangeable that you could swap the badges on most of them and buyers wouldn’t notice.
The Ineos Grenadier is the antidote to this trend: a deliberately anachronistic off-roader which doesn’t even offer a hybrid engine, let alone pure electric power. Its chassis design makes it capable and unbreakable off-road but leaves it compromised on-road, where it will be overwhelmingly employed. It is intended to be polarising: to cut across current car-design orthodoxy and only sell in low volumes to those who want something different.
But if the Grenadier in five-door ‘station wagon’ form is still too conventional and commonplace for you, perhaps you need this: the Quartermaster pick-up. Half a metre longer than the SUV and with an open load bay, it will be an even more idiosyncratic purchase and an even rarer sight on the road, accounting for just five to ten per cent of Grenadier sales.
First, the briefest of recaps. British billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe, founder of the Ineos chemicals group, was irked by Land Rover’s decision to end production of the original, rudimentary Defender, so in 2015 he decided to build his own version named after the pub in which it was conceived (Sir Jim also owns the pub). The Grenadier’s path has been suitably rocky: beset by Covid, a lawsuit from Land Rover, a long pause in production when a supplier went bust and now tariffs, the Grenadier only went on sale in Europe in 2023 and in the US early in ’24.
Exact production numbers aren’t disclosed but Ineos is now thought to be producing close to 20,000 cars each year at a former Mercedes factory in eastern France. More than half of sales are in the US, where Ineos has already turned over a billion dollars thanks to free-spending customers who are loading theirs with every extra. Prices for the Fieldmaster version tested here start at £69,995 in the UK and $84,440 in the US, but most American versions end up costing over $100,000 with options. They are mainly bought for cash rather than leased and join a fleet of at least four other cars. G-wagens, Range Rovers and new-generation Defenders rank high among the vehicles traded in.
Plainly, buyers who can afford to drop six figures on a very discretionary fourth vehicle are not buying them for their utilitarian underpinnings. An Ineos insider confirms that despite the Grenadier’s abilities, customers ‘are not using it off-road in reality, at all’. But those buyers do value scarcity, and the same rugged-but-premium feel which Britain does so well and is typified by Belstaff, which Sir Jim also owns and whose motorcycle jackets lend their names to the Fieldmaster and Trialmaster editions of his truck.
But are the compromises caused by the Quartermaster’s extreme lack of blandness justifiable when you’re not using one on your ranch? There are easier big SUVs and pickups to live with, but fourth cars are seldom rational purchases. The heavy mechanical click of the door latch tells you plenty: this is a properly, traditionally made car; engineered by the same Austrian firm (Magna-Steyr) which builds the G-wagen and assembled from an expensive parts list, including a 3.0-litre straight-six petrol or diesel BMW engine and an eight-speed ZF transmission.
You climb up and into a cabin which utterly rejects the modern, Tesla-led trend away from physical switches and towards screens. Instead there’s just one small (by current standards) touchscreen, and arrays of big toggles designed to be operated with gloves. There’s a large bank of them above your head: you (and your admiring passengers) will think you’re in a military aircraft.
There’s also an old-fashioned ignition key and a physical lever handbrake, and when you turn one and release the other the Quartermaster moves off with a deliberate heaviness unlike almost any other road car. The engine and transmission are audible but not unrefined; performance is sufficient though never thrilling (presumably you already get that from cars one through three); and it rides amazingly well for a machine with simple, off-road-optimised live axles, its weight just ironing rough surfaces away.
The extra length of the Quartermaster helps with straight-line stability: it’s a surprisingly comfortable, cooperative motorway cruiser. But everyone who has driven the Grenadier or Quartermaster notices the steering: you need a ranch to turn the thing around, and its lack of self-centring means that once you’ve wound the lock on you need to actively wind it back off again. Every day is arms day in a Quartermaster, and the steering is the most noticeable difference to a more conventional SUV.
There are other compromises inherent to a pick-up: the three rear seats are more cramped and upright than the station wagon’s, and if you don’t have a tonneau cover for that load bed, you and your passengers’ belongings need to travel in that tight cabin with you, or risk rain or theft.
But those who chose to drive pickups know all of this, and love them anyway. And I think they’ll love the Quartermaster, which stands out even among its pickup rivals, let alone the ever-blander sea of standard cars which surround it. Over the course of a week’s testing I found myself choosing to take it on long, solo motorway journeys for which I had more suitable, economical cars. The Quartermaster might be compromised in its concept and flawed in its aspects of its execution, but character compensates for a lot.