Range Rover still mixing rough with the smooth

By ALASTAIR SLOANE

It didn't take engineers at Land Rover long in the late 1960s to figure out why their prototype Range Rover couldn't go around the side of a hill.

There was nothing wrong with grip - the mechanical wheel-drive system and the four-speed gearbox was the bee's knees back then.

The vehicle's centre of gravity was just the ticket, too. The low-slung 3.5-litre Buick-sourced V8 and its lumping great crankshaft made sure of that.

Trouble was, the engine didn't seem to be getting a regular supply of fuel once the Range Rover got a lean-on over rough ground.

At best, progress was impeded. At worst the vehicle coughed and spluttered and traction was lost, not good in the rough stuff.

Engineers eventually identified the problem - it was the twin carburettors.

They found that as soon as the Range Rover went a certain point beyond horizontal, so did the fuel in the carburettors, thereby affecting supply and combustion.

So they changed carburettors - and the history of four-wheel-drive. The Range Rover has just had its 30th birthday.

Before it appeared four-wheel-drives were workhorses - noisy and uncomfortable.

But Land Rover executives saw a gap in the market for something a bit more sophisticated and commissioned designers Spen King and Tom Barton and engineer Geoff Miller to produce a working model.

The three-door Range Rover was launched in Britain in June 1970. It came with full-time four-wheel-drive, long-travel coil suspension, an all-alloy V8, disc brakes all round, aluminium body panels and four-speed gearbox.

It was a laid-back cruiser on the motorways and a mountain goat off-road. Royalty ordered the first few models and it very soon became hugely popular.

Waiting lists for new models were such that used examples frequently changed hands for more than the original purchase price.

The Range Rover first went on sale in New Zealand in 1972. The first big change came in 1981 with the introduction of the four-door. That year the 100,000th Range Rover rolled off the assembly line in Solihull, the factory in Britain's Midlands.

In 1982, automatic transmission appeared for the first time. In 1985 the High Line model went on sale and in 1986 the 3.5-litre engine became fuel-injected.

Four years later the lavishly appointed Range Rover Vogue SE, with its 3.9-litre engine, opened up a new market.

It was the most technologially advanced model yet, using a chain-driven transfer box and a viscous coupling. It came with leather upholstery, sunroof and colour-coded alloy wheels.

In 1992 the Range Rover was fitted with air suspension and electronic traction control. A long wheelbase model, the LSE, appeared and a 2.5-litre turbo-diesel engine became optional.

In 1994, the second-generation model was launched, powered by a choice of 4.0 or 4.6-litre V8 engines, derivatives of the original 3.5-litre Buick. That was the year BMW bought the company.

This model has been upgraded over the past five years and continues to sell in New Zealand.

BMW sold Range Rover to Ford earlier this year. The luxury four-wheel-drive trades under the banner of the Premier Automotive Group, an international Ford division which includes Jaguar, Aston Martin, Volvo and Lincoln and is managed by a former BMW board member.