The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has dismissed 96 complaints which claimed a Land Rover Defender advert undermined efforts to tackle climate change and ecological damage.

Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) advert for the AM Awards 2021's New Car of the Year, which featured in The Guardian newspaper back in June, showed a Defender off-road, in a forest setting, alongside the headline “Life is so much better without restrictions”.

Complaints – including representation from Adfree Cities, Badvertising and New Weather Institute – challenged whether the advert was misleading in that it implied the vehicle depicted was “above restrictions or rules, including those aimed at preventing climate change or other wide scale ecological damage”, the ASA said.

They also claimed it was “socially irresponsible” because it implied the vehicle depicted could be driven in forests or similar ecologically-sensitive environments, potentially encouraging or condoning behaviour that was detrimental to the environment.

In its response to the complaint, JLR said that it felt that Guardian readers would not reasonably infer that the ad suggested the vehicle itself was genuinely above restrictions or rules.