LAND ROVER LEGENDS THE RANGE ROVER
MANY hundreds of people in JLR and its suppliers are working on the new Range Rover. It’s expected to be revealed in 2021 and will be the fifth generation since the original was launched to the world in June, 1970. Back then, no one had seen anything quite like the Range Rover. Sure, there were things like the International Harvester Scout, the Willys Jeep Wagoneer and the Ford Bronco, but none came close to the Range Rover in terms of off-road capability, onroad performance and style. Journalists were universally impressed, astonished and positive. Rover couldn’t make enough of their new vehicle to satisfy demand and in the early years they didn’t even have to bother with advertising. Secondhand examples sold for more than the list price of a new vehicle.
In almost no time at all it was a car that was associated with good taste, the well-to-do country set, the aristocracy, and royalty. Her Majesty the Queen drove one of the press launch vehicles and advice was offered to Rover regarding the loadspace and how it could be made more comfortable for the corgis. HRH The Duke of Edinburgh was famously photographed standing on the lowered tailgate of a Range Rover at a sporting event. John Steed was known to drive one in The Avengers, as did the rather posh Lady Jane Felsham in Lovejoy. It seemed like everybody wanted to own a Range Rover. And it stayed that way for years.
In truth, the early Range Rovers were pretty agricultural to drive, rolled like a ship in a storm and didn’t have an ounce of luxury in them until the 1980s. Courtesy of the horror that was British Leyland, the Range Rover was regularly starved of development funding to the extent that a four-door version did not appear until 1981 and a diesel only in 1986, despite clear indications that these were what customers had been wanting for years. And, as today’s enthusiasts, preservationists and restorers have discovered, no one at the factory spent much time thinking about corrosion-proofing. But that didn’t stop it being a very accomplished off-road vehicle and an extraordinarily desirable and aspirational motor car. I’d yearned for one since I was old enough to think about it!
Bizarrely, given
