The Range Rover is a 4x4, mid-size off-road vehicle series produced from 1970 to 1996 – initially by the Rover (later Land Rover) division of British Leyland, and latterly by the Rover Group.
The first generation of vehicles produced under the Range Rover name, it was built as a two-door model for its first 11 years, until a four-door also became available in 1981. The Range Rover then successfully moved upmarket during the 1980s, and remarkably debuted in the U.S. as a 17-year old model at the 1987 Los Angeles Auto Show.
Availability of the two-door version was restricted from 1984, but it remained in production for some markets until 1994, when the second generation was launched. From that moment, Land Rover rebranded the original model under the term Range Rover Classic, to distinguish it from its new P38A successor, when the two were briefly built alongside, and applied the name retrospectively to all first-generation Range Rovers.Official Land Rover documentation collections for both 1970–1985 (LHP1, v1.1) and 1986–1994 (LHP2, v1.1) Range Rover refers to the vehicles as "Range Rover Classics", despite not being called that when originally built.
Although formally superseded by the second generation Range Rover, starting in 1994 – both the successor and the more affordable first and second series of the Land Rover Discovery were heavily based on the original Range Rover's chassis, drive-train and body-structure, which in essence lived on until the third generation Discovery arrived, and its mechanical blood-line ended with the replacement of the Mark 2 Discovery after 2004.
Inearly 2020, the 26-year production run of the original Range Rover was counted as the twenty-seventh most long-lived single generation car in history by Autocar magazine.
History
Rover's Land Rover Series I launched in 1948 had been designed to be cheap, simple to manufacture, and suitable for hard work in rural terrain, with minimal concessions toward comfort. Rover shortly realised that a market existed for an off-road capable vehicle with more amenities. In 1949, the Land Rover estate car was released, with a coach-built wood-framed body by Tickford. However, the high price of adding such car-like features as seven seats, floor carpets, a heater, a one-piece windscreen resulted in fewer than 700 being sold before the model was dropped in 1951.
In 1954, Land Rover launched a second iteration estate car, this time aimed at the commercial user who needed an off-road vehicle for carrying passengers without car-like comforts. Based on the commercial variant of the Land Rover, it had seats fitted to the load space and windows cut into the sides. While available with features such as an interior light, heater, door and floor trims and upgraded seats, the estate car retained the base vehicle's tough and capable suspension – as well as its mediocre road performance.
By the late 1950s, Rover had become convinced a market for a more comfortable 4x4 existed in areas such as Africa and Australia, where ordinary motorists faced long journeys on unmade roads that called for four-wheel drive and tough suspension. In 1958 the first of the "Road Rover" development cars was built. Combining the Land Rover's tenacity with the comfort of a Rover saloon car, it featured a Land Rover chassis and running gear clothed in a functional estate car-like body. It never made it into production.
By the 1960s, Rover was becoming aware of the embryonic development of the sport utility vehicle in North America. Proto SUVs such as the Willys Jeep Station Wagon (1949 for the Utility Wagon version with 4wd), International Scout (1961), Jeep Wagoneer (1962) and the Ford Bronco (1966) began the skew of 4x4s towards speed and comfort while retaining more than adequate off-road ability for most private users. To provide Rover a nudge to step up, the president of the company's USA operations shipped a Land Rover Series II 88 to Britain fitted with an advanced small block all-aluminium Buick V8 engine.
Rover acknowledged the emerging recreational off-road market in 1967 under Charles Spencer King, and began the "100-inch Station Wagon" programme to develop a radical competitor. Rover bought a Bronco, which featured the sort of long-travel coil spring suspension necessary for the required blend of luxury car comfort and Land Rover's proven off-road ability. King is said to have been convinced of coil springs while driving a Rover P6 across rough scrubland on part of the Solihull factory site that was being redeveloped. He was also convinced that a permanent four-wheel drive transmission was needed both to provide adequate handling and reliably absorb the power required for the vehicle to be competitive. The cost of developing a totally new transmission was spread between the 100-inch SW project and one working on what would become the Land Rover 101 Forward Control. Powerful, light and sturdy, the Buick alloy V8 earned off-road modifications such as carburettors that maintained fuel supply at extreme angles and provision for cranking the engine with a starting handle in emergencies.
The final bodywork featured a design largely done by the engineering team, rather than David Bache's styling division.
On and off-road concept
Introduced to the public in June 1970, the new "Range Rover" was launched as "A Car For All Reasons", boasting a top speed of around , a towing capacity of 3.5 tons, spacious accommodation for five occupants, hydraulic disc brakes on all wheels, and a groundbreaking four-speed, dual-range, permanent four-wheel drive system.
To much critical acclaim, it appeared that Rover had succeeded in their goal of making a car equally capable both on and off-road. With a top speed of and acceleration from a standstill to in less than 15 seconds, performance was stated as being better than many family saloon cars of its era, and off-road performance was good, owing to its long suspension travel and high ground clearance. The 1995 Classic Range Rovers would reduce the time to around 11 seconds, and increase the top speed to approximately .
Notable off-road feats were winning the four-wheel drive class in the first Paris-Dakar Rally in 1979 and 1981, and being two of the first vehicles (along with a Land Rover Series IIA) to traverse both American continents north-to-south through the Darién Gap from 1971 to 1972.
Even though the concept was initially aimed at customers like construction foremen and military officers who needed 4WD for professional reasons as well as occasional recreational users like skiers, it soon became a car of choice for aristocratic English country house owners.
Body
Like other Land Rover vehicles, most of the Range Rover's bodywork skin is constructed from lightweight aluminium, except for the two-section rear upper and lower tailgates, the rear corners adjacent to the tailgate and the bonnet on all but the earliest models. Apart from minor cosmetic changes, "The back end got vinyl covering on the rear quarter panels and there was the option of a rear window washer and wiper. Inside, the front seats had an extra handle to allow them to be tipped from outside more easily, and the blanked out holes in the dash now had the option of extra gauges." The changes were wing repeater lamps, new decals, black-painted bumpers & mirrors, and a better-looking steering wheel. the body design changed very little in its first decade. However, while utility Land Rovers had body panels rolled from a single sheet of aluminium, the Range Rover used aluminium panels hung on a steel 'safety frame' (a method pioneered with great success on the Rover P6 saloon). This allowed the bodywork of the Range Rover to carry much greater structural strength with the steel frame while retaining the corrosion-resistant and easily repaired aluminium outer panels. While the steel frame was designed by the engineering team, it was expected that Rover's stylist David Bache would provide a design for the outer panels for use on the production vehicles. For the prototypes the engineers designed their own functional body panels simply to protect the occupants and to allow the vehicles to be driven legally on the road. However the clean, square-cut and functional design of the prototype was deemed so good that Bache only altered the detailing, such as providing a different front grille and headlamp design. The Range Rover also marked the first appearance of Bache's trademark "symmetric" dashboard, where a common moulding was used for the fascia superstructure on both RHD and LHD versions, onto which the pod-style instrument binnacle was simply mounted on the appropriate side – Bache would use this concept again on both the Rover SD1 and the Austin Metro in later years. The original fascia would later be nicknamed the "Airfix Dashboard" by Range Rover enthusiasts owing to its hard, low quality plastics which, as the vehicle moved upmarket over the years, betrayed its humble beginnings as a utility vehicle, It remained with the Range Rover up until the very last years of production when it was replaced by the "soft dash" (see below)
Early vehicles may be distinguished by the rear 'C' pillars being absent of a vinyl covering which was introduced a little later in the 1970s.
One of the first significant changes came in 1981, with the introduction of a four-door body. Until then, Range Rovers only had two doors for the sake of body strength, making access to the rear seats – especially ingress – rather awkward. These doors were also very large and heavy. Egress was somewhat alleviated by the special design feature of having two inside door-opening latches: latches in the front of the doors for the driver and front passenger, and a second set of equally large and prominently styled door-opener latches on the inside rear of the doors (behind the front seats), providing rear seat occupants full autonomy to leave the vehicle. They could easily fold the seats in front of them forward, and open the door from their rear seat locations in a somewhat convenient manner.
Several companies offered conversions to four-door Range Rovers in the late 1970s. One of these companies' conversions, by Monteverdi, was even approved by Land Rover to retain warranty after it was presented at the 1980 Geneva Salon. Two years earlier, British Leyland had restructured and promoted Land Rover into its own BL subsidiary and the now more independent company used the Monteverdi as a basis for producing its own four-door model in July 1981. The four-door version was well received by the public — its popularity was such that the two-door was discontinued in the United Kingdom in 1984, although the two-door continued to be produced through January 1994, mainly for the French market.
The first major push upmarket was in 1984, which saw the availability of leather trim, unhinged rear number plate and a new 4-speed ZF automatic transmission; this was followed by the 1985 model year, which saw the instrument pod replaced by a more modern one (adapted from the Austin Maestro) and new door cards (using Austin Metro door handles) with walnut inlays.