Читать книгу Land Rover: The Story of the Car that Conquered the World - Ben Fogle, Ben Fogle - Страница 6

LAND ROVER

The Series I, II, IIa, III, 90, 110 and Defender are all members of the iconic ‘boxy’ Land Rover genre, first produced in 1948, with the current version called Land Rover Defender. To avoid any confusion, in this book I will sometimes refer to them all using Defender as a collective noun. Please don’t hate me.

Lode Lane, Solihull is a flurry of activity. The brick walls are still covered in camouflage paint to disguise the factory from German air raids. The waters of the Birmingham canal flow close by, ready to extinguish any fires from falling bombs. Nearby a field has been transformed into a ‘jungle track’ to test the vehicles. On the factory floor inside, a team of workers are riveting aluminium plates and fixing axles to chassis on cars in various states of deconstruction. This is the famous Solihull Land Rover factory and the workmen are building some of the most iconic cars ever built, the Land Rover Series I, a car that changed the world. But this is not 1948. It is 2016 and I am watching third-generation factory workers making Series I vehicles on the same patch of land that their grandfathers had once done.

Just a few months before, the world had mourned as the very last Defender, the evolution of the Series I, rolled off the factory line. The lights went out on 67 years of iconic history. It had been the end, but now I was back at the very beginning for the rebirth. Where most evolve and advance, here at Lode Lane, workers were using decade-old tools and technology to regress to a simpler time. To make a vehicle born out of post-war rationing to help a country rebuild. This is the reborn project at Land Rover where buyers can spend more money on a ‘new’ 68-year-old vehicle than a top-of-the-range sports car.

As I bounced, cantilevered and splashed along the very same ‘jungle track’ once used by the Wilks brothers to demonstrate the capabilities of these workhorse vehicles, I couldn’t help but marvel at the ageless charm of these iconic cars. Regressive progression. Nostalgic advancement. The new old. Was this the rebirth? Had the Land Rover ever really died? Or was this really the resurrection we had all dreamed of?

It is an oxymoron but a fitting metaphor for the story of the greatest car ever made.