The only thing the new Range Rover couldn't do, though, was be economical. According to Rover, 20-25mpg was possible. According to the wildly smiling owner of your local filling station who had become suddenly rich, you might manage 15mpg. On a good day. With a following wind. It didn’t take a genius to work out why: the Rangie was big, heavy, bluff, low-geared and had permanent four-wheel drive. Detuned or not, the 3.5-litre V8 had plenty of excuses to slurp fuel.
Still, in a world seemingly overflowing with petrol, that didn’t matter much to anyone in 1970 who could afford to spend £1998 on a car. A few years later, though, a series of fuel crises made the Range Rover’s dipsomania a distinct embarrassment. So what did Leyland do? Very little, is the answer, apart from adding overdrive to bring the cruising revs down a bit. No doubt an extra 1mpg was an enormous comfort when you were sitting in a queue outside a garage waiting for the chance to buy a rationed fiver’s worth of juice.
The backroom boffins were aware of the problem, in fact, and a considerable amount of work was put into converting the V8 into a diesel. This turned out to be an engineering cul de sac, the idea being abandoned in 1983; but in beefing up the internals to cope with compression ignition, the team did at least have the basis for the larger capacity petrol V8s that came later.
In the event, a truly economical Range Rover didn’t arrive until 1986, when BL went shopping in Italy and bought the VM 2.4-litre turbo oil burner. The mellifluous V8 burble had been replaced by a crude rattling, but you could go about twice as far on the same amount of fuel. And with a 0-60mph sprint taking almost 20 seconds, owners had plenty of spare time to work out how much money they were saving.
To continue reading this feature in full, grab the October 2010 issue of 4x4 Mart - on sale from Thursday, September 9th at all good newsagents or via www.4x4mart.co.uk
