LAND ROVER LEGENDS
WHEN John Edwards retired from JLR in June 2018 he was keeping a promise he’d made to himself and his family 17 years previously: that he and his wife would retire from their respective full-time jobs at or around the age of 55. As he says when we meet, “one life, live it, was always my mantra and I was determined to be true to it.”
He had celebrated his 28th anniversary at the company in April that year and had just spent four and a half very intensive, full-on years building a new division pretty much from scratch. Undoubtedly on a high, it was a good time to step down.
John joined what was then the Rover Group in April 1990 as a marketing research manager. He had graduated from Liverpool John Moores University in 1984 with a BSc in Sports Science and had followed this with a post-graduate diploma in Marketing Management. As he says, it was not the obvious path for a senior auto industry executive to have taken! After two and a half years working for various marketing agencies in London he landed at Rover, which was at that time owned by British Aerospace. Over the following 28 years he held several of Land Rover’s most senior positions including Managing Director of Land Rover UK and Regional Director roles for Europe and Overseas, before being made Global Brand Director and appointed to the company’s Executive Committee by Chief Executive, Prof. Dr. Sir Ralf Speth. John spent three years leading the Land Rover business, during which time the Range Rover Evoque (L358), fourth generation Range Rover (L405) and Range Rover Sport (L494) were launched. And then in late 2013 he was asked to head up the new Special Operations business that would also embrace Land Rover’s aggressive ambitions to create a heritage division.
John’s career at Rover Group, Land Rover and JLR embraced four very different owners: BAE, BMW, Ford and of course TATA, and it is also notable that he is not an engineer. The old Rover Company had always been led by engineers and engineering, and for many years the engineers had little time for anyone with any other skill or specialisation. When Rover employed its first professional
