Land Rover is a luxury car brand that specialises in four-wheel-drive vehicles, owned by British multinational car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover, which has been owned by India's Tata Motors since 2008.[4] The Land Rover is regarded as a British icon, and was granted a Royal Warrant by King George VI in 1951.[5][6]
The Land Rover name was originally used by the Rover Company for the Land Rover Series, launched in 1948. It developed into a brand encompassing a range of four-wheel-drive models, including the Defender, Discovery, Freelander, Range Rover, Range Rover Sport, and Range Rover Evoque.
The design for the original vehicle was started in 1947 by Maurice Wilks. It was simply called Land Rover (the terms "Series" and "Defender" are retroactive and only introduced in the 1990s). Wilks, chief designer at the Rover Company, on his farm in Newborough, Anglesey, working in conjunction with his brother Spencer who was the managing director of Rover.[7] The design may have been influenced by the Jeep[8] and the prototype, later nicknamed Centre Steer, was built on a Jeep chassis and axles.[9] The early choice of colour was dictated by military surplus supplies of aircraft cockpit paint, so early vehicles only came in various shades of light green; all models until recently feature sturdy box section ladder-frame chassis. Early vehicles like the Series I were field-tested at Long Bennington and designed to be field-serviced.
Land Rover as a company has existed since 1978. Prior to this, it was a product line of the Rover Company which was subsequently absorbed into the Rover-Triumph division of the British Leyland Motor Corporation (BL) following Leyland Motor Corporation’s takeover of Rover in 1967. The ongoing commercial success of the original Land Rover series models, and latterly the Range Rover in the 1970s in the midst of BL's well-documented business troubles prompted the establishment of a separate Land Rover company but still under the BL umbrella, remaining part of the subsequent Rover Group in 1988, under the ownership of British Aerospace after the remains of British Leyland were broken up and privatised.
In 1994 Rover Group PLC, including Land Rover, was acquired by BMW. In 2000, Rover Group was broken up by BMW and Land Rover was sold to Ford Motor Company, becoming part of its Premier Automotive Group.
