48 Years of Range Rover: Peerless design and engineering innovation through every generation

Featured in:
March 2017

Animation celebrates Range Rover’s enduring design and innovation over almost five decades. Range Rover is the original luxury SUV, epitomising the best of British design. Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/ls6PibauaK0
Two minutes is not long, but it’s enough time for Land Rover to celebrate a motoring icon. The Range Rover has pioneered design, refinement and engineering innovation since 1970 and Land Rover has showcased the evolution of its luxury SUV through four generations with a unique animation lasting only 120 seconds.

The specially commissioned visual has been created to mark key dates in the history of the legendary SUV, as production of the original two-door model ended 23 years ago this January and SVAutobiography Dynamic goes on sale around the world.

The detailed animation shows how today’s Range Rover retains many of the design hallmarks established by the 1970 Classic and culminates with the latest derivative, SVAutobiography Dynamic.
Range Rover has evolved into the world’s most elegant and sophisticated SUV, achieving more than one million sales (1.7 million to date) along the way. Trademark features including its ‘floating’ roof, distinctive clamshell bonnet, continuous belt line and practical split tailgate all pay homage to the groundbreaking original.

The Range Rover story begins with the 26 pre-production models, which wore Velar badges in an effort to hide its identity – velare means to ‘veil’ or ‘cover’ in Italian – made up of letters from the ‘Land Rover’ badge that usually adorn the front and rear of a vehicle. Next comes the timeless Range Rover Classic two-door as the images showcase successive generations, finishing with the most powerful derivative, the 550PS SVAutobiography Dynamic built by Jaguar Land Rover’s Special Vehicle Operations (SVO) division.

When it was first launched in 1970, Range Rover was one of the first vehicles to deliver permanent all-wheel drive while many others were still selectable. In 1971 the original model was cited as ‘an exemplary work of industrial design’ when it became the first vehicle to be displayed at the world famous Louvre museum in Paris and it has been at the forefront of design and engineering innovation ever since.

The evolution of the Range Rover is visualised with the following models:
• 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



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