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Named model · Defender · 1995–96

HM Coast Guard 90

A Defender 90 hard top of the Coastguard Rescue Service, in HM Coastguard's dark blue and yellow livery: the 4×4 that carries a volunteer Coastguard Rescue Team and its rope, mud and search equipment to the cliff top or shoreline. The vehicle shown wears N45 RCG, from a batch of Defender 90s registered in 1995–96.

Special · Marine
HM Coast Guard 90 — front three-quarter render

Factory colours

Codes on hover. Hex values are representative approximations of period paint unless a source states a measured value.

History

HM Coastguard has coordinated maritime search and rescue around the United Kingdom since 1822, but the people who physically go over a cliff edge or into an estuary are the Coastguard Rescue Service: today some 352 Coastguard Rescue Teams and around 3,500 volunteer Coastguard Rescue Officers stationed along the coast. A team's Land Rover is its station — everything it owns travels in the back of it.

The work dictates the vehicle. Teams are tasked by the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centres to rope rescues on cliffs, mud and quicksand rescues in estuaries, water rescue and shoreline searches for missing people, in any weather and usually at the point where the metalled road stops. A hard-top Defender 90 gives a short, manoeuvrable platform for cliff-top tracks and slipways, with racking in the load space for rope, harnesses, stretchers, mud pads and lighting, a blue light bar and two-tone horns, and dash modifications for the team's radios.

A vehicle registered in 1995 was delivered to the Coastguard Agency, the executive agency then running HM Coastguard; it merged with the Marine Safety Agency on 1 April 1998 to form the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, which reports to the Secretary of State for Transport. The livery is dark navy blue with yellow markings, reflective chevrons and COASTGUARD lettering — distinct from the white-based Battenburg of the police and from the red of the fire service.

The registration on this vehicle places it in a small block of Coastguard Defender 90s issued together: N45 RCG has been photographed on static display at the Royal International Air Tattoo in 2022, and N47 RCG was photographed on patrol at Newhaven in East Sussex during high-tide flooding in January 2017. Land Rovers have since largely given way to Ford Rangers, Mitsubishi L200s and estate cars in the Coastguard fleet, but the Defender remains the shape most people picture parked at a cliff top with its blue lights turning.

Registry record

Manufacturer
Land Rover (Rover Group), Solihull
Manufactured
N-registration Defender 90s of 1995–96; HM Coastguard Land Rovers in service from the 1980s
Engine type
300Tdi 2.5 L turbodiesel four (Defender 90 of this period)
Country of origin
United Kingdom
Status
sister vehicles photographed in service in 2017 and on public display in 2022

Catalogue data

Record kind
Named model
Model line
Defender
Wheels
4
Nominal wheelbase
90″

Catalogue fields describe the vehicle's structure and body as this registry records it. They are not certified factory measurements, and no performance figures are published here.

Sources & citations

Researched sources

Catalogue references

Registry record updated 2026-09-10T11:44:23.330Z · status: researched