48 years of Range Rover: the evolution of the world’s most luxurious SUV

19 January, 2017

When talking luxurious, refined, well-engineered, and pioneering designs, there is probably one SUV that springs to mind … Range Rover. 

Since its inception in 1969 (as a prototype), the brand has evolved into one of the world’s most elegant and sophisticated SUVs, with any number of who’s who celebrities driving one, and it has since cracked more than one million units sold (1.7 million to date, to be exact).

Forty eight years on and it’s hard to sum up the brand’s heritage in a simple two-minute space, but it was long enough for Range Rover to celebrate this motoring icon through a specially commissioned animation — created to mark key dates in history for the legendary SUV.

You can see that today’s incarnations retain many of the original design hallmarks established way back when in 1970. These include its ‘floating’ roof design, distinctive clamshell bonnet, continuous belt line, and practical split tailgate.

Timeline: 
1969 Range Rover Prototype (Velar)
1970 Range Rover Classic (two-door)
1973 Range Rover Classic (Suffix C)
1981 Range Rover Classic (four-door)
1994 Second-generation Range Rover (P38a)
2001 Third-generation Range Rover
2012 Fourth-generation Range Rover
2014 Fourth-generation Range Rover Long Wheelbase
2015 Range Rover SVAutobiography
2016 Range Rover SVAutobiography Dynamic

To finish first, first, you must build a winner

Can-Am royalty
Only three M20s were built, including the car that was destroyed at Road Atlanta. This car was later rebuilt. All three cars were sold at the end of the 1972 season. One of the cars would score another Can-Am victory in 1974, driven by a privateer, but the M20’s day was done. Can-Am racing faded away at the end of that season and was replaced by Formula 5000.
These days the cars are valued in the millions. It was unlikely that I would ever have seen one in the flesh if it hadn’t been that one day my editor asked me if I would mind popping over to Taranaki and having a look at a pretty McLaren M20 that somebody had built in their shed.
That is how I came to be standing by the car owned and built by truck driver Leon Macdonald.

Lunch with … Roly Levis

Lunching was not allowed during Covid 19 Lockdowns so our correspondent recalled a lunch he had with legendary New Zealand racing driver Rollo Athol Levis shortly before he died on 1 October 2013 at the age of 88. Michael Clark caught up with Roly and members of his family over vegetable soup