Range Rover

About

As of 2026, it's 56 years old.

The Range Rover invented a category nobody knew they wanted: the luxury off-roader. When it arrived in 1970, the idea of a go-anywhere 4x4 that was also genuinely comfortable was borderline heretical. Engineer Spen King's team gave it a smooth aluminum Rover V8, coil-spring suspension, and permanent four-wheel drive — Land Rover toughness with a velvet lining.

The original Classic was so cleanly styled that the Louvre once displayed one as a work of industrial design. It could ford a river, tow 3.5 tons, and then waft you to dinner — a trick that would define every luxury SUV that followed, from the Cayenne to the Bentayga. Everyone who came after was, in some sense, copying Solihull's homework.

By the time the fourth-generation L405 landed in 2012, the recipe had been polished to a mirror shine: an all-aluminum body, a supercharged V8, and an interior closer to a private jet than a Land Rover. It became the quiet flex of choice for royalty, footballers, and anyone who wanted to arrive looking like they could leave the road if they felt like it (they never did).

More than half a century on, the Range Rover is still the benchmark — the rare vehicle that's equally at home crossing a Welsh bog and idling outside Harrods. It made mud aspirational, and the entire industry has been chasing that contradiction ever since.

Range Rover through the years