Range Rover

The Range Rover is a luxury sport utility vehicle produced by British automaker Land Rover since 1970.

Spen King and Gordon Bashford led the engineering team at Rover that developed the original model. Land Rover built five generations of the vehicle, beginning with the Classic generation, followed by generations introduced in 1994, 2001, 2012, and 2021. The first generation was sold exclusively as a two-door wagon until 1981, when a four-door version joined the line. Early models featured a permanent four-wheel drive system, coil spring suspension, disc brakes on all four wheels, and a Rover V8 engine producing 97 kW (130 hp).

Two specially prepped models crossed the roadless Darién Gap during the British Trans-Americas Expedition in 1972, traveling from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. French driver Alain Génestier drove a Range Rover to victory in the car category of the first Paris-Dakar Rally in 1979, and René Metge won the event in another Range Rover in 1981. The Musée du Louvre in Paris displayed an early vehicle in the 1970s as an example of twentieth-century industrial design. Rock musician Ginger Baker drove a pre-production unit across the Sahara Desert in 1971.

The fourth generation arrived in 2012 with an all-aluminum monocoque body structure and adaptive air suspension. British assembly began at the Solihull factory in the West Midlands, where Land Rover built over 326,000 units of the Classic generation before production ceased in 1996. Queen Elizabeth II used royal review models during state ceremonies in 1977 and 2015. Film appearances include the James Bond movies Octopussy in 1983, Tomorrow Never Dies in 1997, and Skyfall in 2012, where villain and security convoys drove black versions.