range rover

My enthusiasm for off road vehicles is about zip. I have no time for them, their ungainly road manners and the concept of having such a hulk of an object as a vehicle for general road use. As a car driver, I also find them annoying as they're impossible to see around or over, and the people that drive them seem to proudly sport a growing disdain for anything smaller than their own vehicle on the roads and in car parks.

Therefore it is with some surprise - even to myself, that one of my favourite designs is an example of a type of vehicle that I openly despise. 

The Range Rover was launched in 1970 to a public who held the off-road-vehicle as just that; a cumbersome yet purposeful device employed for use by farming types, surveyors, builders and anyone else who would regularly traverse roads that were less than 'made'. More interestingly, it came from the same creators who brought the world the Land Rover, possibly the Range Rover's absolute antithesis - a truly rugged design, purposeful by all measures and really uncompromising. The Range Rover by comparison was really a compromise by blending the mechanical elements and designed-in robustness  of the Land Rover with the luxury and civility of any of Rover's saloon cars at the time.

Conceptually, the Range Rover was a pioneer for it spelled the beginning of the appeal of the 'Luxury SUV' as we know it today, and the idea of it having been a gamble is truly mystifying given the demand that there was for it, not only in its first years as a two door wagon, but beyond the beginning of the 80's and into the 90's as a true four-door, multi-purpose station wagon. It was, as a design, the fore runner of the entire genre we today regard as the 'sport utility vehicle'.

Spen King, Gordon Bashford and Graham Bannock were convinced in the mid nineteen sixties that there would be a demand for an up-market off roader and through combined use of conventional LR underpinnings and new thinking in the styling department the idea of the "100 inch station wagon" was born. Stylist David Bache was primarily responsible for the sculpted form that took shape from 1967 to 1969 as a subtle reform of the original shapes manifested by Spen King and Gordon Bashford that would see production and release by 1970.

Look at a 1970 - 1995 Range Rover wagon today and you will look at a shape that looks not long out of date, so one can imagine the impact that it had in 1970, when so much of automotive styling still relied on soft curves and gentle creases. The original Range Rover was an excersize in chiseled sculpture and refinement of straight lines - the 25 year production run of that original shape is sure testament to that. 

It took Land Rover Cars, as the company was known post-1978, until 1983 to respond to customer demand for a four-door body shell. More as a consequence of internal politicking and lack of funds after Rover was absorbed into British Leyland than as sheer ignorance to demand, was there such a delay, but it allowed other companies to make adjustments and modifications to the Range Rover. Arguably, none more so than Peter Monteverdi, the Swiss who's company was responsible for 60's supercars such as the 350S, and the Hai, produced the first four-door Range Rover and looking back, it is hard to see how else the design would have been resolved, but nothing changes the fact the Monteverdi's car reached production before Land Rover's and the basic design of the four-door wagon is still credited to him by many.

Driving a Range Rover today is a revelation. When so many cars make you feel so remote from the outside world by shrouding the driving experience in electronics, the original Range Rover makes you feel like the king of the road, with a high driving position and nearly 200lbs + of torque, not to mention a truly resonant exhaust note few other factory produced four wheel drives can boast the feeling they leave the driver. And the drive is what all great cars - and possibly all four wheel drives - should be about.