50 YEARS GAME CHANGER

1ST GEN

“WE DID IT off our own bat. It wasn’t management saying ‘do this’, we did it ourselves because we thought it was a worthwhile thing to do, and the management accepted it. The sales department thought it was stupid: ‘What? A Land Rover costing two thousand pounds – you must be mad.’” So said the late Charles Spencer King of the birth of his brainchild the Range Rover in an interview given in 1995 to Australian motoring journalist Shane Nichols.

Spen King, as the Rover Company senior engineer was known, was many things, but mad he was not. When the Range Rover made its debut to a group of prominent (and almost exclusively British and European) motoring journalists in West Cornwall in 1970, it was immediately clear that here was a whole new type of vehicle. What wasn’t so obvious was the profound effect on motoring during the close of the 20th century and into the 21st century that the Range Rover would have. Arriving in Australia in 1972 priced at $7475 – when the most expensive Toyota LandCruiser cost less than $5000 – the Range Rover came at a time when 4x4s where generally crude and utilitarian. Yet, the Range Rover managed to better its contemporaries in genuinely difficult off-road conditions due largely to its long-travel coil-spring suspension while at the same time providing on-road comfort and performance to shame many a luxury car. In essence, the Range Rover did what all modern passenger 4WDs