The first Land Rovers were green because of surplus aircraft paint
Early Land Rovers came only in shades of light green, and not for style. After the war, Rover used leftover military supplies of aircraft cockpit paint. The vehicle itself was sketched out on a farm in Anglesey, and its first prototype sat on the chassis and axles of an American Jeep.
Maurice Wilks, Rover's chief designer, began the project in 1947 on his farm at Newborough, working with his brother Spencer, the company's managing director. The prototype, later nicknamed Centre Steer, borrowed Jeep underpinnings, and the finished vehicle was launched at the Amsterdam Motor Show on 30 April 1948. It was a practical working machine built on a sturdy box-section ladder frame and designed to be repaired in the field.
That frame lasted a remarkably long time. For half a century every Land Rover and Range Rover sat on one, until the Freelander arrived in 1997 with a unified body structure. The Range Rover of 1970 took the name upmarket, and the long and short wheelbase models later became the Defender, whose original version survived until 2016. The brand also built nothing but four-wheel drive vehicles for 62 years before adding two-wheel drive versions from 2010. King George VI granted it a Royal Warrant in 1951.
Ownership changed repeatedly. Originally a product line of the Rover Company, it passed into British Leyland and became a separate company in 1978, when the hyphen in Land-Rover began to disappear. BMW bought it along with Rover Group in 1994, then sold it to Ford in 2000. In 2008 India's Tata Motors bought Land Rover and Jaguar from Ford for £1.7 billion, picking up the rights to the Daimler, Lanchester and Rover names as part of the deal.
Since 2013 the two brands have been run as one company, Jaguar Land Rover, with Land Rovers assembled in the United Kingdom, Slovakia, India, China and Brazil. The utilitarian farm vehicle of 1948 has become a range made up entirely of upmarket and luxury SUVs.
Source: Land Rover
