Sadly nursing a quite horrific hangover from last night, I am still to move from the sofa.
Nonetheless I was just watching quite a sad programme about Landrovers.
At one point the man showed a 1948 Landrover and said it was one of the first made.
I thought they had been around longer than that ?
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Mark,
Try www.lrsoc.demon.co.uk/
Series one from 1948
regards
Ian L
ps dont hit the keyboard too hard when typing
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It was inspired by the success of the Jeep during the war, and I think the prototype used either an actual Jeep chassis or certainly something very similar.
The original layout has remained ever since - engine offset to the left, drive shifted sideways through the transfer box, then the two prop shafts emerging forward and aft to the axles that have their differentials offset to the right.
The picture I saw of the original prototype had its steering wheel in the middle!
They were originally conceived as a multi-purpose farm vehicle, with provision for a number of power take-offs front, rear, and underneath the gearbox, for driving shafts and belt-driven machinery. Sadly these options don't seem to feature now, I suppose because they aren't needed on the school run.
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I thought they had been around longer than that ?
Nope, it just seems like it.
Especially to poor souls suffering from alcoholic remorse.
Hawkeye
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Stranger in a strange land
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The first prototypes - two of them, were built on Jeep Chassis and I believed used a lot of other Jeep components.
As someone has already pointed out, they were first built after the war and the first of the series 1s looked very much like the jeep at the front.
The two prototypes IIRC cannot be found. They were either lost, scrapped or destroyed.
A recent issue of Land Rover Monthly has some photos of one of them on a farm, it appears to be ploughing a field.
Hugo
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Were there one or two centre-steering wheel prototype Land Rovers built in 1947? That is a question that is part of Land Rover mythology, the equivalent of the Turin Shroud!
The centre-steer was built as a feasibility study and was based on a Jeep chassis with a Rover Engine and simple aluminium bodywork. I've read that work was already in hand to design the first 'real' Land Rover (series 1) prototypes when the centre-steer was completed.
The Wilkes brothers, who ran Rover, had an ex-US army Jeep on a family farm, and there is speculation that this was used as the basis of the centre-steer. Nobody seems to know what happened to this prototype, and it's even been suggested that it was returned to its original Jeep format.
So although the Land Rover was heavily inspired by the American Jeep, apart from the centre-steer prototype, it was not based on the Jeep.
Cheers, SS
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