Flying Huntsman, a subsidiary body shop of the British tuner Kahn Design, has announced a small-scale two-seater spider with a folding roof based on the current three-door Land Rover SUV Defender 90, its production will begin next year.
Kahn Design, founded in 1998 by designer and entrepreneur Afzal Kahn, has extensive experience building complex conversions based on Land Rover vehicles (especially the extended six-wheeled classic Defender), but the Flying Huntsman 90 Spyder announced today is presented as a new milestone in the development of the studio and at the same time as a tribute to the “golden age of British coachbuilding.”
Let us remind you that in the factory range of the current Land Rover Defender there is no version with an open top, although its frame predecessor had one – it was called Soft Top. The gap in the factory range is successfully filled by tuning studios: in the spring of this year, the Land Rover Defender Valiance Convertible from the Dutch workshop Heritage Customs and designer Niels van Rooy entered the market, and the Flying Huntsman 90 Spyder is an even bolder vision of the recreational version of the SUV.
Typically, the word Spyder refers to open versions of sports cars, and, for example, with Porsche these are the most expensive versions, differing from “just convertibles” in the special design of the stern and the shaped aerodynamic fairing behind the cabin. The Flying Huntsman studio also came up with an elegant fairing for its Spyder, it is handmade from lightweight sheet aluminum and covers the rear part of the cabin, so that the rear seats have to be removed, but there remains a trunk comparable in volume to the trunk of a standard factory Land Rover Defender 90.
So far, only design sketches of the Flying Huntsman 90 Spyder have been published, they show that a tensioner can be installed on top of the fairing fabric top with long rear straps, it allows you to travel in bad weather conditions, but you will have to install and remove the roof manually.
Afzal Kahn’s company intends to complete the construction of the first copy of the Flying Huntsman 90 Spyder in the second quarter of 2024; the studio will produce no more than eight such convertibles per year, each taking about six months to produce. The price has not yet been announced, but it is clear that it will be very high given the exclusive finish of each piece and the large number of man-hours required for production.
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