THE ANTI-CLIMAX

The P38 is in a good place right now: a quarter century after its release in 1994, it’s becoming a classic. It’s been a tough road to follow in the path of its original predecessor, later literally called the Classic, but with enough subsequent generations there’s now space for the P38 to gain some mainstream appreciation.

While some traditionalists might have been sceptical at the time, there were enough of them to buy the new Range Rover plus a huge new group of customers making up the burgeoning luxury 4x4 market that, in the mid-1990s had little choice beyond leather and wood trim added to otherwise rather agricultural machinery.

The Range Rover P38 was the perfect vehicle to appeal to both markets. Still based on the original Range Rover platform first developed in the 1970s and bequeathed to the Discovery in 1989, the famous Land Rover axle articulation and attention to approach, crossover and departure angles was joined by traction control to make the