On 1st June 1970, British Leyland invited the press to a six-day trial of a new 4x4 estate. There was a degree of surprise within the motor industry that the launch of such an important vehicle would take place at the Meudon Hotel in Cornwall, but earlier that year BL had spent so much on the debut of the Triumph Stag that there were only limited funds left for promoting the Range Rover.
Rover had considered building a station wagon that offered greater comfort than the Land-Rover as early as 1951 with the RWD Road-Rover. Solihull eventually abandoned that project by the late 1950s, but in 1964 management seriously considered the possibility of an off-roader competing with the likes of the Ford Bronco in the US export market. The planned 100in Station Wagon would combine the V8 engine recently acquired from General Motors with permanently engaged 4WD. The company did consider building a cheaper version with either the P6 2000 or the Land-Rover 2.25-litre engines. In the event, Rover never realised these plans.
The design engineer Gordon Bashford devised a box-section chassis with long-travel suspension and low-rate springs. Charles Spencer ‘Spen’ King, the firm’s Chief Engineer of New Vehicle Projects, devoted considerable time to the mechanical layout. He created a simple box shape to accommodate the running gear and would later claim the bodywork had occupied only 0.1% of his development time. By 1966 Leyland acquired Rover, and Donald Stokes, the company chairman, approved the design in early 1967.
The company tasked David Bache and his team with refining the bodywork, and they created the distinctive side indentation. Rover made ten prototypes for evaluation across the world, using
