This is how the Range Rover has evolved

At the end of 1948, Rover added another version of the Series 1 ‘Land Rover’ to its line-up. It was called the 80-inch Station Wagon, and the story goes it was developed alongside the normal Series 1 for people who wanted the same kind of go-anywhere-ness, but with a degree of comfort the standard car, which didn’t even get a roof as standard, was simply unable to provide.

Photography: Simon Thompson

This feature was originally published in issue 289 of Top Gear magazine

So, the Station Wagon got a body fashioned from wood and aluminium by coachbuilder Tickford. A one-piece, laminated glass windscreen was fitted along with the all-important heater and plusher upholstery and trim. It even had a split-folding tailgate. But few were sold, just 641 in all, so it was withdrawn in 1951.

Why? It was way too expensive – £950 in 1950, which was ten times the average annual salary. And because it was classed as a car rather than a commercial vehicle, it wasn’t eligible for the same tax breaks as a regular Series 1. By all accounts, it was a commercial flop. But as a concept, a more civilised kind of off-roader, it was remarkably similar to the car that would follow in its footsteps two decades later. A car that would offer a combination of off- and on-road performance not seen before but frequently since.

We are of course talking about the Range Rover, launched in 1970 as a two-door, four-speed manual with the 3.5-litre, twin-carb Buick-derived Rover V8 and permanent four-wheel drive. This one’s a ’72, in Bahama Gold, its insides bedecked in the finest vinyl British Leyland could lay its hands on. Beside it is the current Range Rover, with its clever all-aluminium moncoque chassis (the MkI is old-school body on frame), ruddy-great diesel engine and slippery eight-speed automatic.

Nowadays people cross-shop Rangies with S-Classes, which is why today’s car has plush leather thrones, twin-DVD screens and importantly, rear doors – something the MkI lacks. Early Range Rovers had surprisingly spartan, utilitarian interiors. It wasn’t until some years after its launch that Land Rover, which in 1979 was split from Rover and made into its own, separate company under the BL umbrella, started to see the Range Rover as a properly luxury good. Land Rover’s split from Rover also signalled the first real investment in the Rangie since its launch. A 4dr was introduced in the early Eighties, an automatic gearbox soon after, and the quality and equipment levels were steadily improved until production ceased in the mid-Nineties. From humble beginnings, the Range Rover had become a properly luxury item.

This one is not luxury. It doesn’t have a radio, or any real creature comforts, and you can see actual daylight through the panel gap between the passenger’s door and nearside front wing. Climbing up into the driver’s seat was, until the Rangie came along, an experience reserved exclusively for van, lorry and bus drivers. The front seats are set high on a kind of pedestal so rear-seat passengers can stick their feet under them, but without rear doors access was tricky.

What the old car lacks is headroom – I’m just under 6ft, and anyone taller would struggle, their head hard against the headlining. Once you’re up, you’ve a properly good view thanks to spindle-thin pillars, meanwhile the mirrors mounted on the front wings and the flat, square bonnet mean you know precisely where the corners are. It’s physically smaller than today’s car, for the same reasons every car is bigger than its Seventies equivalent: safety.

The V8 fires with little drama and settles into an even idle. Once you’ve manhandled the spire of a gearlever into first, you’re away. The clutch and non-power-assisted steering are predictably weighty, but once you’ve got it off the line, it’s a remarkably easy thing to stroke along. Not that we would recommend driving it especially quickly. The steering is best described as “on again, off again”, the brakes are predictably ineffective, and it lists like a badly loaded supertanker in high seas.

Before you’ve even set off, the long-travel springs are betrayed by the way it squats when you sit on the tailgate. They imbue the Rangie with not only decent levels of on-road comfort, but axle travel that’ll put most SUVs short of a modern Rangie to shame. Today’s Rangie is less of an event, though. Air suspension keeps things level, and its diesel grumbles away to itself, delivering the kind of performance in the Seventies reserved for sports cars.

The new one was our Luxury Car of the Year in 2012 – few cars have such sumptuous interiors, yet can wade through 900mm of water. The old car may not have that luxuriousness we’ve come to expect, but it shares that sense of completeness with the current car. That it’s as much at home drawing up outside the Ritz as it is battling its way through dense South American foliage. We love it.