WE love our Land Rovers, but they didn’t just go from a drawing on a page to a final product. To reach the point of being a production item doesn’t just happen overnight. Many weeks and months are spent designing, prototyping, making, testing – then redesigning and repeating the process. New vehicles undergo complex and rigorous testing programmes, where pre-production test mules go through every type of test, check and verification you can think of before you and I can buy them.
In the late 1960s the process was simple, even for a vehicle such as the Range Rover – just eight initial prototypes were needed for everything from barrier-crash testing to cooling and braking tests – but things moved on, rapidly. By the L322, Range Rover development testing lasted three years, covering 1.5 million miles in 25 countries. Cars were
