Land Rover Defender to end production

One of the world's most recognizable and rugged vehicles, Land Rover's Defender, is about to come to the end of the line.

Land Rover will end production early next year, Bloomberg News reports. There is no replacement for the $35,100 SUV in sight.

It's not lack of demand that's Defender's problem. Rather, it is improved vehicle standards. Bloomberg says the British-built Defender can't meet pedestrian safety or CO2-emission standards. "It's time to move to a new chapter," Nick Rogers, Jaguar Land Rover's head of engineering, tells Bloomberg.

The good news? The Defender is indeed so rugged, strong and easy to repair -- even out in the wilderness -- that there is a strong aftermarket for it. That means there's a nice business in rebuilding them.

One outfit in the business is West Coast Defenders in Los Angeles, which obtains well-worn Defenders from around the world and rebuilds them. When we profiled the business last year, Matt Perlman was specializing taking mid-1980s Defenders, completely going over the vehicles to give them a new life.

The Defender wasn't always called the Defender. It got the name in 1990 after years as being known as the Land Rover 90 or 110, a reference to the length of the wheelbase.

Those old Land Rovers were sold in the U.S. from the 1950s through 1974. In 1993, there was a move to bring Defenders back to the U.S. for sale -- only about 500. But it didn't last long. By 1996, Defender has run seriously afoul of U.S. emissions standards. By 1997, it was decided its small slice of sales didn't justify the modifications that would be needed.