Range Rover Second Generation
eBook - ePub

Range Rover Second Generation

The Complete Story

James Taylor

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eBook - ePub

Range Rover Second Generation

The Complete Story

James Taylor

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About This Book

The second generation Range Rover was arguably Land Rover's first model designed as a luxury vehicle. It was a major leap for the company, but a very successful one as well. Despite controversy over its looks, and some initial teething problems, it became a worthy successor to the much-loved original. Range Rover Second Generation The Complete Story draws on the memories of designers and engineers as well as on a wide variety of factory sources to provide the most authoritative history of the mode yet. The book covers the full development history; the changes during eight years of production; Range Rovers for the North American market; full technical specifications and finally Range Rovers and the emergency services.A companion volume to the author's Range Rover First Generation - The Complete Story (Crowood 2018).

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Publisher
Crowood
Year
2018
ISBN
9781785004742
CHAPTER ONE
DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT
By the time Land Rover introduced the second-generation Range Rover in autumn 1994, the original model had been in production for no fewer than twenty-four years. Even then, its production life was not over, because Land Rover kept on making it for another eighteen months or so to ease the acceptance of the new model. The old one had developed such a following that the company was understandably nervous about how well the new one would go down.
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After the Discovery name was taken for the new vehicle that had been developed as Project Jay, the Range Rover project was renamed Pegasus. This slide was made for a presentation at the time.
Quite obviously, the first-generation Range Rover was an enormously hard act to follow. As its creator, Spen King, said to the author in the mid-1990s, it is one thing to design a completely new model that becomes impressive over the years, but a much harder task to follow that up with a replacement that has to be impressive from the start. So it is important not to underestimate the size of the task that was facing Land Rover in the mid-1980s when it began to contemplate how to replace the Range Rover. By global standards, it was still a small company – tiny when compared to Toyota, then, as now, the world’s largest maker of four-wheel-drive vehicles – and by any standards replacing an icon like the Range Rover was a very tall order.
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From 1988, the new Range Rover project became known as the Discovery programme. This picture of a wall in the styling studio shows some of the ideas that were then in play.
It was not until 1988 that Land Rover really began to focus on creating a new Range Rover, and the design and engineering programme went through three stages between then and the vehicle’s 1994 launch: first it was called Project Discovery, then it became Project Pegasus, and finally it became Project 38A. The six years of its development present a complicated story, which is more easily understood when divided into segments. So this chapter begins with the background to each of those three project stages, and then goes on to tell the detailed story of how each element of the vehicle came into being. But as a prelude to that, it is worth taking a look at what had happened before 1988.
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When the Pegasus name began to attract unwelcome attention, John Hall changed the project name to 38A. This is a slide from another internal presentation.
FIRST THOUGHTS
A few ideas for a new Range Rover had been considered after Land Rover Ltd had become a standalone business within British Leyland in 1978. However, discussion on the subject was entirely theoretical, because nobody had identified a date by which such a new model might be needed, nor had anybody given any serious thought to what might be expected of that new model. There would, inevitably, be a new Range Rover one day. But for the time being, the old one was selling very well, thank you, and there were plans to make it a more luxurious vehicle than it had been when new in 1970. There was no real vision beyond that.
The earliest indication that Land Rover had started to take the challenge of a new Range Rover seriously dates from 1981. Land Rover’s long-serving Chief Engineer, Tom Barton, retired that year, and his deputy Mike Broadhead took over from him. Broadhead initiated a concept study within the Engineering Department that was known as Adventurer. Its aim was to investigate a rationalized range of Land Rovers and Range Rovers that would share as many common features as possible. These features would not be confined to such things as engines and gearboxes, but might also include a common body-chassis structure. This aspect of the study was handed to Gordon Bashford, a key figure in the design of the original Range Rover, who also retired that year and found himself immediately retained as a consultant on Adventurer.
In the Adventurer study, a great deal of effort was put into better packaging that would give more interior space for a given vehicle size. Gordon Bashford’s part of it proposed some quite original ideas, but there was never any real chance that Adventurer would be anything other than a paper study. Land Rover were already too far down the road with a new Land Rover utility – introduced as the One Ten in 1983 – and were not going to need another all-new model for some years. However, Adventurer was not entirely forgotten. The concept of a rationalized range remained alive and well by 1985 – after Mike Broadhead had left and Bill Morris had become Chief Engineer – when it was revived as the twin Inca and Ibex projects.
THE INCA AND IBEX PROJECTS
By 1985 Land Rover was beginning to re-establish itself after a very difficult period in the early 1980s. The company’s traditional overseas markets, notably in Africa, had collapsed under the twin impacts of government changes in overseas funding, and cheap, light 4×4 utilities made in Japan. The company’s core product, represented by the last of the Series III Land Rovers and the first of the One Ten and Ninety coil-sprung models, was struggling for overseas sales. In 1983 Land Rover had recorded its first ever annual loss, and new Managing Director Tony Gilroy was faced with the job of turning the company around.
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It could have happened: there were early discussions about making the new Range Rover a sort of people carrier, and this rendering from the Styling Department reflected that. The date appears to be early 1985, and the designer was George Thomson, who later took the lead on the second-generation Range Rover.
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One of the full-size renderings for Range Rover during the Ibex phase is seen during a viewing at Drayton Road.
His decision was to re-orient Land Rover towards developed countries, to make up losses in Africa by gains in Europe and the USA, and to do that he needed a product that would have the right appeal. The utility Land Rover, even in its latest coil-sprung One Ten and Ninety form, was not it, and the only solution was to make the Range Rover into a luxury-class product. So by 1985 there was a new regular production flagship variant called the Range Rover Vogue in showrooms, plans for introducing the Range Rover to the USA were being implemented, and a programme of future upgrades had been mapped out to make the Range Rover a more credible alternative to expensive luxury saloons.
In that climate, it is no surprise that somebody decided it would be wise to take a more serious look at the longer-term future of the Range Rover. So it was that the first proper thinking about a new Range Rover went into a pair of related projects that were known as Inca and Ibex. Land Rover was far from cash-rich at the time, and so the plan was to develop both utility Land Rovers and a new Range Rover from the same basic structure. There has been some confusion about which code name referred to which vehicle, but the discovery of some photographs of new Range Rover proposals in a drawer in the old Styling Department (now known as Design) a few years ago makes clear that the Range Rover was Ibex.
Quite a lot of planning was done around these twin concepts, but neither progressed beyond the drawing board. Those who were involved remember that the Range Rover was to have an all-welded body, while the Land Rover would need a bolt-together construction to allow for overseas assembly and a large number of different variants. This fundamental divergence tended to drive the two designs in different directions, and in the end the designers decided it was not possible to build the two vehicles off a single common platform.
While work was being done on Inca and Ibex, Land Rover’s business priorities were changing. Tony Gilroy had commissioned a market study to determine the best way for Land Rover to go forward, and during 1986 this made clear that there were important developments in the 4×4 market. On the one hand, the success of the Range Rover had led to the creation of a number of cheaper imitators, mostly made in Japan, that were aimed at family buyers and were selling strongly. On the other hand, there was a growing interest in the use of 4×4 vehicles to support outdoor sporting activities, and customers expected those vehicles to be as comfortable and easy to drive as a conventional car.
It was obvious that if Land Rover could develop a model that would cater for both of those market sectors, it could have a strong-selling product that would accelerate its return to long-term sustainability as a company. So by mid-1986, the number one product development priority at Land Rover had become Project Jay, which would be launched in 1989 as the Land Rover Discovery. One result was that Inca and Ibex simply withered on the vine. However, it is interesting that Project Jay reflected similar thinking: just as Inca and Ibex would have minimized costs by sharing major components, so the Jay vehicle minimized costs (and development time) by sharing its chassis and much of its drivetrain with the existing Range Rover.
CHANGES OF OWNERSHIP (1)
Land Rover Ltd had been formed in 1978 as a standalone business under British Leyland, although of course the Land Rover marque had started life in 1948 as an offshoot of the old independent Rover Company. After a major reorganization in 1986, what had once been British Leyland became the Rover Group, and Land Rover Ltd retained its independence within that new group. However, British Leyland had been under government control since 1974, and by the end of the 1980s the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher was pursuing a policy of privatization. So the Rover Group had to go, and the selected new owner was British Aerospace, who took nominal control in 1988.
One of the first things to happen under the new ow...

Table of contents