The INEOS Grenadier is a weird vehicle. Because it was essentially one billionaire’s fever dream drawn on the back of a 5-pound note, some of its design decisions have failed to translate to the motoring public, especially the motoring press. High on the list of those is the Grenadier’s omission of a lot of creature comforts and niceties that you’d expect to find as standard equipment on a vehicle costing half as much.
Here’s the thing, though: I find INEOS’s decision to make the Grenadier an analog girl in a very digital world a good thing. Not only does having fewer electronics mean fewer ECUs to break (this is ostensibly INEOS’s reason for stripping back the tech), but it also sands down the layers that insulate you from really driving your vehicle, rather than just pointing it somewhere.
In short: INEOS flew me to British Columbia to disconnect for a couple of days of off-roading, gorgeous scenery, and great food. The Grenadier is arguably the least tech-heavy 4×4 you can buy these days, and INEOS believes that’s a benefit, and not only for reliability.
To celebrate the Grenadier’s analog nature, INEOS hosted a “Digital Detox” event on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast, where the cell coverage is thin, the mosquitoes and wildfire haze thick, and the vibes are immaculate. The goal, as the name would imply, is to help disentangle our brains from the constant barrage of news, work, social media, and commerce.
I’m pretty far from what you’d call a screen addict, but I’ll take any excuse to get some off-road time in someone else’s rig, so a 3-hour flight from L.A. and a 30-minute seaplane ride to the hotel, and I was ready to go.
What’s the Grenadier’s Deal?
So, I’ve already talked about the Grenadier’s commitment to being as analog as possible, but what does that actually mean? Well, it’s far from being a road-legal tractor, but the Grenadier does lack things like keyless start or auto-up power windows. It also doesn’t have an electronic transfer case; instead, you shift it with high-effort, high-satisfaction Bowden cables.
The seats are manual (though blessedly heated). This reduces failure points and, to some degree, cost. INEOS has fewer than 40 ECUs peppered throughout the vehicle, while a modern luxury vehicle can easily have three times as many.
Yes, the Steering
The nontraditional decisions made during the Grenadier’s design phase don’t stop at electronics, either. One of auto journalists’ favorite things to complain about with the Grenadier is its steering.
Listen, I get it. It’s weird compared to every other car on the road. It is very numb, thanks to its recirculating ball design (though INEOS did sharpen it up just off-center for the 2026 model year), and it doesn’t aggressively self-center.
This means that whatever steering you put into a turn, you need to take back out as you complete said turn. Yes, it takes some getting used to, but I’ve found that after a few weeks of living with Grenadiers over the past couple of years, I did indeed get used to it.
Why would INEOS do something so contentious and for which it’s gotten so much crap over the years? Because it’s better off-road. Everything the Grenadier does, it does because it’s better off-road. The numb steering and weird geometry mean that the wheel doesn’t fight and fatigue you when you’re on the trail. That’s it.
A Different Bird
The rest of the Grenadier’s particulars you are probably familiar with by this point, but just in case, here are the highlights. It’s got a full-ladder frame chassis, and solid front and rear axles from the company that makes John Deere’s axles (Carraro).
It also has a detuned BMW B58 3.0L inline-six gasoline engine paired with a ZF eight-speed automatic transmission, and a manually shifted two-speed locking transfer case. Front and rear locking diffs are optional. Up to speed? Good.
The reason I flew up to British Columbia, aside from it being a gorgeous time of year to be in the Pacific Northwest, was to get some real off-road seat time with the Grenadier outside of my normal California desert environs. As usual, it didn’t disappoint.
Digital Detoxing
The “Digital Detox” thing that INEOS is hyping also plays into how the Grenadier drives off-road. Most modern serious off-road vehicles, like Land Rovers, Toyota Tacomas, and Land Cruisers, use electronics to democratize the dirt, in a manner of speaking.
With those vehicles, you select one of a handful of off-road terrain modes, and the vehicle’s computers figure out how to get you through your obstacle. Part of this is done with brake actuation, part with locking differentials, and part with throttle calibration. It makes getting way off pavement easy and relatively safe, but removes part of the decision-making from the process.
The Grenadier is wildly capable in a variety of off-road environments, but it doesn’t hold your hand. There are no terrain modes, and you decide what diffs to lock when and what speed your transfer case should be in. This is inherently more difficult for those who’ve had no instruction in off-road driving. But, because you’re fully in control of the systems, if you’re skilled, you’re nearly unstoppable.
When you reach your destination at the end of a long, challenging trail, you feel as though you’ve done something. You figured out how to best utilize the vehicle to make it through — and that satisfaction and sense of self-reliance are a big part of the Grenadier’s appeal to a lot of folks. I know it is for me.
The route that INEOS took us on was gorgeous. It wound its way through the lush BC forests just inland of the coast. Then came some huge climbs, an easy water crossing, a few boulders to pick our way through, and even a random wild dog that rushed out of the bushes to bark at our convoy. It was pretty far from a day of hardcore off-roading, but that’s fine. That’s not what this experience was about.
Trail Break
One thing that this experience was about was hanging out and having a good time with like-minded people. To that end, INEOS arranged for our lunch stop to be in the woods with a full pizza-making setup from fellow British company Gozney.
Gozney makes a whole range of pizza ovens, from restaurant-spec units to the super-portable Tread model, which GearJunkie will be reviewing in the near future. The pizzas were great, but even if it was bad, it was still pizza in the woods, and that’s cool.
In the interest of fire safety and because it’s summer, there was a propane fire pit setup with Adirondack chairs, and a Grenadier with a 270-degree awning and a rear-door table set up to dispense beverages. Regrettably, because we were driving, none of those beverages was beer, but I digress.
Throughout the day, the only screen I found myself looking at was the tiny LCD on the back of my 15-year-old digital point-and-shoot camera. I didn’t pull out my phone. I didn’t feel the need to check email, Slack, or Messages. I wanted to be present in the moment, and the Grenadier made that easy.
The Anti–One-Car Solution
I’m a firm believer that the idea of a one-car solution is one of the worst things to happen to car design in the past 3 decades. Cars that try to be OK at everything are great at nothing, and ultimately, what we’ve gotten is dozens of largely homogeneous vehicle models, with very few designs managing to stand out. The Grenadier definitely stands out. Not always for the right reasons, but you can’t confuse it with anything else that’s in production in 2026.
Is the INEOS Grenadier a vehicle for everyone that’s well-suited to all occasions? Absolutely not. It’s a deeply flawed, niche vehicle for a small-ish subset of off-road enthusiasts. Do those flaws make me want one any less? Again, absolutely not.
This is because they largely stem from the Grenadier’s hyper-focused mission, and friends, I like specificity. I also love simplicity as a rule, and technology only when there’s a reason for it. That sums up the Grenadier, pretty succinctly, actually.
Out of everyone I know under the age of 50, I’m probably the one who needed a digital detox the least. Frankly, if you ask my wife, I could stand to look at my phone more often, but I’m glad as hell that I got one anyway. Now I just need to figure out how to afford a Grenadier, because I’m pretty much hooked, and that will surely involve plenty of screen time, so maybe I’ll have to call up INEOS for another detox. It’s a vicious cycle, I guess.
