48 Years of Range Rover: The Evolution of the World’s Most Luxurious SUV

When talking luxurious, refined, well-engineered, and pioneering designs, there is probably one SUV that springs to mind … Range Rover.

Since its inception in 1969 (as a prototype), the brand has evolved into one of the world's most elegant and sophisticated SUVs, with any number of who’s who celebrities driving one, and it has since cracked more than one million units sold (1.7 million to date, to be exact).

Forty-eight years on and it’s hard to sum up the brand’s heritage in a simple two-minute space, but it was long enough for Range Rover to celebrate this motoring icon through a specially commissioned animation — created to mark key dates in history for the legendary SUV.

You can see that today’s incarnations retain many of the original design hallmarks established way back when in 1970. These include its ‘floating’ roof design, distinctive clamshell bonnet, continuous belt line, and practical split tailgate.

Timeline:

1969 Range Rover Prototype (Velar)

1970 Range Rover Classic (two-door)

1973 Range Rover Classic (Suffix C)

1981 Range Rover Classic (four-door)

1994 Second-generation Range Rover (P38a)

2001 Third-generation Range Rover

2012 Fourth-generation Range Rover

2014 Fourth-generation Range Rover Long Wheelbase

2015 Range Rover SVAutobiography

2016 Range Rover SVAutobiography Dynamic

Watch the video here