The modern history of Jaguar Land Rover – or JLR as it likes to be known now – is founded on the success of the Land Rover brand while Jaguar struggles to find its place in the modern automotive landscape and is effectively taking a break while its new EV future takes shape.
In fact, so successful is the Land Rover part of the business that the firm is planning to let the Land Rover marque itself take a back seat while the individual model lines – Discovery, Range Rover and Defender – become marques in their own right.
To anyone who can remember the Land Rover of the mid-80s, this all seems rather curious since the Defender tag itself is actually a pretty youthful one – in fact, it’s a year younger than Toyota’s upstart Lexus brand.
Ultimately, the history of the Defender badge actually begins with the rise of Japanese leisure-orientated 4x4s that had Land Rover on the back foot, like the Mitsubishi Shogun. After a belated flurry of investment, the Range Rover had started to head ever more upmarket and was now out of reach for the buyers who wanted a true dual-purpose vehicle.
Meanwhile, the original Land Rover was looking increasingly agricultural as an everyday family vehicle, meaning the company desperately needed something to fill the mid-range spot.
The answer of course was to stick a modern seven-seater body on the Range Rover chassis to create the Discovery. It was one of those brilliant bits of lateral thinking that the British motor industry has historically been so good at when the chips are down and budgets are tight. The Land Rover Discovery proved to be a runaway success.
It did however create a new problem; one of badging. Using Land Rover as a marque meant that in theory the range would now include a ‘Land Rover Land Rover’ and so a new name was required for the original.
It would in fact be the second name change for the vehicle in just a few years, since the addition of coil springs, permanent four-wheel drive and five-speed gearbox in 1983 had seen the original Land Rover renamed as Land Rover 90, Land Rover 110 and the extended-chassis Land Rover 127, the number signifying wheelbase length in inches.
It was hardly snappy though, and after some deliberation – and negotiations with another car maker with rights to the name – the Defender name was chosen. The word had already been used internally as a project name but was also a perfect choice to symbolise the vehicle’s rugged nature and its historical association with the military.
