Elise
Elise is a Land Rover Defender 110 300TDi. She has a 2.5L turbo diesel engine generating a 120 horsepowers. Before buying the car, it has always been registered in Germany. As far as we now know Elise has been in Tunis and Iceland in April 2009.
The current modifications made to the standard defender include
- a snorkel with cyclone filter (although on the lrch it was mentioned that various tests resulted in no overall gain of air intake),
- Long ranger fuel tank of 120L (total capacity is 160L of diesel)
- Air compressor
- Possibility to make a sleeping bed in the back
- Diff guard
- GPS with external antenna
One might think that naming a car is something only fools would do... But I disagree. Elise is originally German and her name is derived from the cartoon The Pink Panther. In the cartoon there is a Aardvark, although in the whole world played as a male without a name (just being Aardvark), in Germany it's a female called Elise. Being a similar blue color and the huge popularity of the Aardvark Elise, the Landy soon became known as Elise.
A short quote from Wikipedia (The Ant and the Aardvark):
"The German-dubbed versions of the cartoon are extraordinary for several reasons. The protagonists no longer imitate well-known actors. The male aardvark is, for unknown reasons, transformed into a female anteater named Elise (Eliza). Charlie the ant (voiced by Fred Maire) remains male, but is no longer a Dean Martin parody. Elise is voiced by Marianne Wischmann, one of Germany's most renowned voice actresses.
The German-dubbed versions of the cartoons have gained a huge fan community over the decades, mainly because of Wischmann's incomparable dry and matter-of-fact delivery of Elise's punch lines, as well as the distinctive vacuum cleaner sound Elise makes with the nose. Thus, the cartoons are commonly known under the title Die blaue Elise (Blue Eliza), leaving out the mentioning of Charlie the ant completely."