The 15 Cars That Turned Land Rover Into Britain's Most Iconic Export

The 1948 Land Rover was the car that started it all. Following World War II, where the US Military Jeep had made an impression on British Forces, we needed our own. Maurice Wilks, a farmer from Wales, set about the task of creating a capable 4 wheel drive vehicle which could endure the battlefield. It was built upon the Jeep chassis and featured a 1.6 litre Rover engine.

Merging the luxury saloon brand with the Land Rover wasn’t quite working, so the Series II came about as a second attempt but it still didn’t go down well. Perhaps Land Rover were just a bit too far ahead of the market?

Rover had handed control over to Leyland by this point, and they were keen to re-vitalise the efforts made 10 years prior to create a luxury SUV. the Velar was the name of the first prototype. This model was a 2-door coupé and featured a Buick petrol V8 engine.

The year following the display of the prototype Velar, the Range Rover was born. The first production models received huge acclaim from the press. The car was first released featuring a big petrol V8 engine which would only churn out 130bhp… laughable by modern standards.

The Land Rover brand remained a bit pedestrian through the 70s and 80s, with their next properly significant vehicle being the Discovery 1 in 1989. Land Rover had created a void in the market between the luxurious Range Rover and the agricultural Defender. The Disco 1 plugged that void.

The Land Rover Freelander came about as a smaller alternative to the Discovery, now built under the new watchful eye of BMW. It was available with a huge choice of trim levels, engines and body styles and it was actually the best selling four-wheel drive car in Europe from 1997 to 2002.

In 2002 Land Rover released the car which is now synonymous with the Land Rover brand. This is the full-fat Range that turned pop-culture into a massive marketing tool. Celebrities, footballers, politicians and business owners flocked to this car as the new statement of wealth. Engines and electronics were largely sourced from BMW.

It’s strange to think that there has only really been two generations of the Range Rover Sport. You see so many on the roads, on the TV screens and in the magazines, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Sport has been in production for decades. In reality, the first Range Rover Sport was released in 2005 as a mid-size SUV which offered all the luxuries of the bigger Range Rover, in a more manageable and more affordable package. This was Land Rover’s first step toward making the ‘Range Rover’ brand slightly more accessible to the public. It wasn’t cheap, starting at over £50,000, but it was considerably cheaper than the larger sibling and it also slightly more affordable to run. Even though the Sport was the more affordable Range Rover, by Land Rover’s modern standards the quoted 33 mpg on offer from the 3.0 V6 Diesel is simply frightening, and the petrol V8s economy figures were considerably worse.

It didn’t take Land Rover long to realise that the demographic that typically buys their vehicles was almost entirely male. That didn’t mean the brand wasn’t appealing to female buyers, it just indicated that there wasn’t an option in the range to suit the desires of the typical female motorist. Enter, the Evoque. Only slightly longer than a regular hatchback but with an incredibly luxurious interior, appealing running costs, big boot and a comfortable drive. The car was a massive success and really widened the appeal of the Land Rover family.

In 2014, the Land Rover Freelander 2 made way for the Discovery Sport. The Freelander 2 had served well for the firm from 2006 to 2014, but it was never taken as seriously as a 4x4 as its bigger sibling, the Discovery. The Freelander name was dropped and in came the Discovery Sport, the most affordable model in the Land Rover range and it features the award-winning Ingenium diesel engines, making it one of the most economical compact SUVs on the market. Land Rover says that the 2.0-litre diesel unit is capable of putting out a huge 60mpg. In 2015, it’s first full year, Land Rover sold 69,501 Discovery Sports worldwide, then in 2016, it became the best selling Land Rover model, after selling 122,460 units globally.

If you thought the original Evoque was daring, how about this? The Evoque Convertible was a car that nobody saw coming. Remember, the Land Rover and Range Rover brand stem from being powerful, unrestrained and masculine agricultural machines. With the Evoque convertible, they coined a whole new segment which never existed before. The world’s first premium, compact, convertible SUV. Prior to the Evoque, every single Land Rover model ever produced was most frequently bought by males, which isn’t surprising. The Evoque, however, appealed to a completely different demographic, and 60% of buyers were female. Females are also more likely to buy convertible cars than males, so naturally, it made sense to chop the roof off the Evoque. Not only is this one of the most important cars Land Rover have built because of its design, but also because it helped open the brand to a whole new market.

The new Discovery was unveiled on the eve of the Paris Motorshow in 2016 and went on sale from early 2017. It uses the same platform as the Range Rover and Range Rover Sport, and it is important for a number of reasons, but most notably because it is the first Discovery to seemingly ditch the practical, utilitarian looks in favour of a more modern and stylish aesthetic. There were countless changes made with this Discovery, but one of the most important was the use of an aluminium shell, which saved the Discovery a massive 480kg over the outgoing model, and making it more nimble and less cumbersome, which is particularly handy on tricky terrain. This latest discovery was also the model that saw the 1.2 millionth Discovery sold since 1989 in January 2017.

Early in 2017 we were treated to the return of the Velar marque. Fitting between Evoque and the Range Rover Sport, the Velar shares the platform from the incredibly successful Jaguar F-Pace and it comes in at ‘just’ £45,145. Don’t go thinking they’ve forgotten their roots, although this Velar sits even lower than the Evoque, it still has all the off-road technology and capabilities as the rest of the Range Rover brand, so it still has that innate ability to go where you please.

The first plug-in hybrid Land Rover model was announced in October 2017. The Range Rover, which was tarnished as a ‘gas guzzler’ just ten years ago, was made available as a plug-in hybrid. This means that a fully charged electric motor combines with the 4-cylinder petrol engine to return up to 101 miles per gallon. Impressively, the Range Rover Sport PHEV will also go up to 31 miles on electric only, so if your office is nearby, you wouldn’t have to touch your fuel tank. Don’t go thinking that this hybrid version is a slow and boring model, because it still packs a staggering 404PS and 640 Nm of torque, which is more than plenty. This is just the first effort from Land Rover who hope to offer an electrified version of each car in their whole model lineup by 2020. 
 

In March this year, Land Rover took the wraps off their new Range Rover SV Coupé - a £240,000, hand-built, super-luxurious SUV to rival the likes of the Lamborghini Urus and Bentley Bentayga. There will only be 999 models of the SV Coupe, but it promises to be the most luxurious car the firm has ever built and in all likelihood the most desirable SUV on the market. Although the SV Coupe is going to weigh quite a bit, it will be powered by a 5.0litre V8 engine which packs enough punch to take the super-SUV from 0-60 mph in just 5 seconds. Brutally quick.