The news comes courtesy of Edmund's Insideline, which had a brief encounter with Land Rover Global Brand Director, John Edwards.
The British firm's executive told the news outlet that Land Rover is testing the waters with the DC100 concepts and that it is a working project.
"I had predicted we'd get a lot of reaction and that some of it would be negative," said Edwards.
"I was involved in the development of the [2000] Mini and when I showed the R50 concept to the owner's clubs, some of them wanted to kill us. That is what you must expect. Overall, the reaction to DC100 reinforced what we wanted to do and told us that we're pretty much on the right track," he added.
If you scroll down to our gallery, you can see some of the proposed design sketches that are slightly different from the DC100s we saw in Frankfurt.
While Land Rover has not yet confirmed the North American availability of the next Defender, Edwards hinted at it: "sometimes we talk too much about the NAS [North American specification] 90 Defender and surfer dudes, and not enough about the Red Cross, Zambia or the Australian Outback. We want to get back to our roots, but it would be nice if in doing so, we can also sell it to the Californian surfer dude."
Story References: Insideline
