Jaguar, Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Maserati, Aston Martin… they’re all just now getting into the luxury SUV market now. But the Range Rover has been there a lot longer. 48 years, to be exact, since Land Rover started developing the first model, and 30 years since it first reached North America.
In the span of those few decades, LR has gone through four generations of Range Rover – from the two-door model launched in 1970 to the four-door in ’81, the second-gen in ’94, the debut of the third in 2001, and the fourth in 2012.
The sum total is a Range Rover that owes much to – but is an entirely different beast from – its predecessors. The latest model is made almost entirely of aluminum (where the original wore aluminum panels over a steel frame), and it’s also bigger. Much bigger: where the original stretched just 175 inches on a 100-inch wheelbase, the latest long-wheelbase model extends nearly 205 inches on a 123-inch wheelbase.
A larger vehicle needs more power, but the extent to which Land Rover has ratcheted up the output is staggering: compared to the 135 horsepower in the original, the latest Range Rover SVAutobiography Dynamic boasts four times that at 550 – and is now reaching dealers, incidentally, across the United States.