Land Rover

History

Land Rover started in 1948 at the Rover Company as an off-road workhorse for farms and trades, shown publicly at the Amsterdam Motor Show on 30 April 1948. The Range Rover followed in 1970 and opened the luxury segment to the marque, and in 1990 the original utility line took the Defender name. Ownership changed hands repeatedly: British Leyland, then BMW from 1994, Ford from 2000, and Tata Motors since 2008. Since the move to a House of Brands in June 2023, JLR has run Range Rover, Defender and Discovery as brands in their own right, with Land Rover kept above them as the heritage mark.

EV strategy

The first battery-electric Range Rover went on sale in early September 2026 after two delays, with more than 61,000 people on the waiting list by then. JLR deliberately keeps several powertrains side by side for Range Rover and Defender, from mild hybrid through plug-in and full hybrid to fully electric, and intends every one of its brands to have a fully electric model before the decade is out.

Good to know

• Rover's chief designer Maurice Wilks sketched the idea in the sand of a beach on Anglesey in 1947, and the prototype was built on a Willys Jeep chassis.
• King George VI granted the marque a Royal Warrant in 1951, the British royal household's supplier appointment.
• The Solihull plant near Birmingham has built Land Rovers since 1948 and builds the Range Rover today, while the Defender has come off the line in Nitra, Slovakia, since 2020.
• A cyberattack stopped all JLR production on 2 September 2025, and the lines only restarted step by step from 22 October.