How could I motorize the LEGO Land Rover Classic Defender (10317)?

Question

The latest LEGO Land Rover is primarily a system set:

Can this set be motorized using Technic or other components?

Answer 1

The set isn't motorized out of the box, but this is possible without too much modification. There is a Technic structure inside the vehicle to facilitate the working steering wheel and suspension found in the model:

We can make use of this to connect both a drive and steering motor to this set.

Driving the Rear Wheels

The real wheels are attached to an axle assembly connected to the rest of the vehicle via a suspension system:

Here's the rear axle:

One way to drive this axle is to replace it with a motorized version that attaches to the suspension. This isn't how a real car would be driven, but it limits the amount of modification that we need to make to the rest of the vehicle. Here's a quick example I came up with:

If you're wondering what happened to that motor, I happened to use one that I've opened previously.

Steering

Because this model already features a working steering wheel, it is fairly easily to motorize.

This is made even simpler because the design uses a central gear that can drive a steering wheel on either the left or right of the vehicle for easy modification.

We can replace the engine in the front of the vehicle with an L motor in order to drive the wheels:

Unfortunately, the linkage used does not support much torque, so the L motor will break this connection if allowed to drive the steering at full power.

At reduced power on the steering motor, this all works together fairly nicely as expected:

There's certainly more optimization that could be done to clean up this build, but this shows one way to motorize this vehicle with as little rebuilding as possible.

Despite the fact that this model can be motorized, it isn't really well suited for it. Being a relatively large system build, there are many bits and pieces that can fall off of this when driving around. As just one example, the wheel arches are just held on by a few studs can can fall off easily. This set can be motorized if desired, but it may be better off as a display model.