There’s no room for excuses in the off-road world, a segment meant to put vehicles through the most dramatic situations. So explained George Ratcliffe, commercial director for startup automaker Ineos and son of its billionaire founder, Sir Jim Ratcliffe. During our conversation, the younger Ratcliffe sat next to us as we fact-checked the claimed ground clearance of the new Ineos Grenadier Quartermaster on the side of a rock the size of a Renault Twingo. Yup, that sounded like 10.4 inches. For hours we crawled through sand and rock near California’s Joshua Tree National Park and suffered not so much as a “check engine” light.
The Quartermaster represents the flags of many nations. The British-owned Ineos engineered the vehicle with help from Austria’s Magna Steyr, which builds the Mercedes-Benz G-class (and, previously, the mighty Pinzgauer military ute of the Swiss Army). The company was unsuccessful in getting politicians in the U.K. to subsidize a manufacturing plant near home, but then lucked into a thoroughly updated Mercedes-Benz plant complete with 1300 employees near the French-German border in Hambach, France.
The Quartermaster is sold in the U.S. with a BMW-sourced gas engine and an eight-speed ZF transmission exclusively. The front and rear live axles with 4.10:1 gears are built by a famous Italian tractor company—Carraro, not Lamborghini—and the driveshafts are from Dana. The two-speed transfer case with a 2.5:1 low-range ratio is a Tremec unit.
