Driving all five generations of the Range Rover: charting the rise of the luxury SUV

"The Range Rover wasn't quite the first luxury off-roader. And, if you climb aboard this original example, you might wonder if it was a luxury vehicle at all.

"Well, the luxury is something deep down, not the superficial signs. It's not about carpet, leather, veneer. Or powered this or automatic that. The 1963 Jeep Wagoneer – which actually was the first luxury off-roader – had those. Not the Range Rover, not at first. This Range Rover has manual steering, wind-up windows and three pedals. The deep luxury is in its space and capability..."

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"This generation of Range Rover had a comparatively brief production life, and you can see why. The schema of separate chassis and live axles was normal in the early-1970s, and OK for an off-roader in the 1980s. But the Mercedes ML had arrived to give the Range Rover a bit of a seeing-to in on-road dynamics, and the BMW X5 went further, showing it was possible to have a tall vehicle with more or less car-like ride and handling.

"Given BMW now owned Range Rover, it was clear things had to change. So this generation had the shortest life of any Range Rover. The P38A was conceived as an evolution. Its successor is a quantum leap..."

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"Its parentage was chaotic, but its purpose and character felt wholly unadulterated. The L322 was developed largely in Munich, and BMW had the expertise to give it dynamic sophistication. But BMW, led by R&D chief Wolfgang Reitzle, knew there was no point in building an X5 clone. So Land Rover engineers provided the vision.

"Team Britain, under Geoff Upex, also provided the design. Its awesomely clean discipline won out over rival proposals from Chris Bangle's Munich studios. The interior too is like nothing else, and it works as well as it looks..."

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"During the L405's conception, it was increasingly obvious the world's sports-car makers were eyeing the money of rich 4x4 buyers. Their idea was to build a thing that would, if anyone asked, torture its tyres round a track, even if that meant quietly parking some of the other qualities of a luxo-SUV. Porsche, Mercedes-AMG and BMW M were in there; Maserati, Lamborghini and Aston Martin had signalled their intentions. These were the elephants on the circuit.

"Jaguar Land Rover had other vehicles for that job – the fastest versions of the Range Rover Sport and F-Pace. The L405 Range Rover went the other way. Too much sportiness poleaxes a 4x4's abilities in the two dimensions that make a Range Rover so distinctive: on-road comfort and off-road traction..."

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"The cabin is right there with the luxury saloons, but as with the exterior, beautifully and confidently simple in aesthetic. Which is achingly hard to carry off because if something is simple but not quite right, you soon notice. This one is pretty much just a base model: go up the food chain to the four-seat LWB versions and it all gets very individual-recliner-with-fridge.

"Which probably wasn't quite what the vets, police and land agents who bought the 1970 Range Rover would have expected, or even wanted. But there you are. It started as a great vehicle that luxury-car buyers people began to treat as a luxury vehicle, first in Britain and then across the world. Here we are with 53 years of luxury having been added to suit those buyers. But the original capability hasn't been subtracted..."

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