IT’S always amusing to watch visitors to the Dunsfold Collection Museum walk past this vehicle without a second glance. For me, it’s become an indicator of how much a Land Rover enthusiast really knows about the company’s engineering and product development concepts, quirks, tangents and cul-de-sacs.
What you see here is the LCV2 or, to give it its full name, Lightweight Concept Vehicle Phase Two, and although it deliberately bears a strong resemblance to an early 1990s short-wheelbase Defender, it could not be more different. In fact, it is so different that perhaps we should really ignore the fact that it has Defender badging on the front grille and the offside rear panel. The badges are not there to announce to the world that this is a new Defender, they are there to help make it look like an old Defender, so nobody would give it a second glance when it was out and about on the public highway in 1997.
By 1994, Rover’s Technical Strategy team was increasingly
