It’s the world’s most versatile car:
brilliant off-road, comfortable on it and the best towing vehicle ever devised.
We explain how a legend was born and reborn
The Discovery is the 4x4 for all seasons.
Its sheer versatility means it’s like having two or three different cars on
your drive. No wonder more than a million have been sold.
Even if you’re one of the rare Land Rover
fans who don’t like the Discovery, you must be eternally grateful for its
existence. It is, you see, the vehicle that saved the company.
If it wasn’t for Discovery, the company
would have folded and the name Land Rover would join others like Austin,
Morris, Wolseley, Hillman, Humber and Singer as quaint reminders of a time when
Britain had a man-sized car industry.
The
Discovery is the 4x4 for all seasons
Ever since it was unveiled at the Frankfurt
Motor Show in September 1989, the Discovery has gone from strength to strength.
The original 200Tdi model was face lifted
in 1994 by the 300Tdi series, then replaced by Discovery 2 and its
five-cylinder Td5 engine in 1998. Discovery 3 followed in 2004, which in turn
made way for the Discovery 4 in 2009 – both of the latter powered by
high-performance TDV6 diesels. These are the five vehicles featured today, in
an off-road setting at Rockingham Castle, Northamptonshire.
The Watson family has lived at Rockingham
Castle for over 500 years, making it the longest-inhabited family home in the
country. It’s an appropriate setting for a family of cars that look like
they’ll go on forever.
The Discovery’s story began about 30 years
ago, in the early 1980s, within Land Rover’s Solihull HQ. Then part of the
ailing British Leyland group, the company wanted to build a medium-sized 4x4 to
compete with the growing threat of the Japanese SUVs, but there wasn’t the
money available within the cash-strapped company to create and all-new vehicle.
So Land Rover’s brilliant engineers and
designers did what they always did: they improvised and found a solution. The
new vehicle – codenamed Project Jay was built on a 100-inch Range Rover
chassis, using various bits of BL cars and vans raided from the parts bins.
The first sketches appeared in 1985 and
looked remarkably similar to the eventual production model, apart from the ugly
roof line. The Discovery’s distinctive stepped roof didn’t appear until the
first full-sized clay model was fashioned, a year later.
By 1988, BL had been taken over by British
Aerospace, who gave the green light for Project Jay to go ahead. A year later,
Discovery was born.
Discovery 200TDI
After its unveiling at Frankfurt, Land
Rover launched the new Discovery at Plymouth, where a press fleet of shiny new
vehicles, each bearing G-WAC Warwickshire registration plates, were assembled
for the benefit of the world’s press.
Landrover
200tdi 4x4
The interiors were styled by the Conran
Design Group, with acres of light Sonar Blue plastic. That and the big windows
and twin sunroofs gave the new vehicles a bright, airy feel. Outside, the
bodies were adorned with typical 1980s stick-on decals, including a huge
compass design, which Land Rover bosses presumably thought evoked the name
Discovery. The press loved it and so did the public when it went on sale that autumn.
Discovery quickly became Europe’s best-selling 4x4.
The
interiors were styled by the Conran Design Group, with acres of light Sonar
Blue plastic
The 200Tdi 2.5-litre four-cylinder turbo diesel
engine was a huge advance over previous engine was a huge advance over previous
Land Rover. At last the company had produced an oil-burner capable of keeping
up with modern traffic and it consequently outsold in the UK at least. The
thirsty 3.5-litre Rover V8 petrol and a seriously underpowered sub-2-litre
four-cylinder Rover-derived MPI petrol engine, introduced in a bid to attract
fleet owners in Britain and Italy, where engines under two liters earned tax
breaks. They didn’t win any fans, though.
