It eats speedhumps, and humps game farms

An exterior virtually unchanced for
four decades, owner by three continents
(despite its humble island origins) the Ranger
is now the only  car for game farms.

IT has been owned by BMW, Ford and now Tata.

So you can say it is popular.

Its two-box design has not changed much since it was first sketched by two engineers in 1967.

So you can say it is timeless.

The French exhibited the prototype in the Louvre museum as art in 1970.

So it is definitely a flower child at heart –—no matter what the bunny huggers say.

And its makers never intended it to be driven on tar roads by soccer moms. The first ones had PVC injection moulded seat and vinyl cladding.

You were supposed to go out and get it all muddy inside.

Its makers had designed the interior so that, back at the ranch, Ranger owners could just hose down the seats and floors.

Despite these wishes, the Range Rover has over the past 40 years became a symbol of the particular genius the English have, namely to assimilate best practices from any other culture, be it Roman justice or German precision or Indian curry — or even South African programmers. It has, in fact, become quite in voque.
One thing the Rangy never was, was cheap and these days, a Range Rover Vogue SE is quite dear at R1 307 100. The personalised Autobiography costs a grand more.

Competing against it are the Mercedes-Benz G-Class (which costs even more) and the Toyota 200 VX, (which cost three grands less).

Good as they are, neither the German nor the Japanese have the sheer presence of the Brit, which uses its recently assimilated DNA from the BMW stable to create a road clearance of 28,3 cm on its adaptive air suspension.

Like the Merc, the Brit runs on active adaptive dampers that ensure a level ride in corners, even at speed.

The Range Rover uses Germany’s Billstein dampers to monitor input forces 500 times a second, to stiffen the ride as needed in the turn and relax on the straight.

An eight-speed ZF box helped me keep the average in-town consumption to a civilised 8,9 km/l (11.2 l/100).

A sporty bit of driving changed this marginally to 8,6 km/l (11,6l/100km).

Talking about sporty, the hulking 4x4’s 700 Newtons kick in as soon as you push the go-faster pedal a third of the way in, enabling you to swerve and swoop its bulk into any opening that presents itself in the traffic.

In town, the 20 inch tyres and those active Billsteins take not a blind bit of notice of speed humps.

In the veld, the engine just growls a bit deeper to force itself over rocks and other impedimenta in front of the wheels,

Inside, you as the director of 4x4-affairs do nothing but go, “ummm, lets try this button with the picture of rocks/snow/steep hill”.

Push it, and Land Rover’s proven system of 4x4xbutton will direct affairs to control steep descents or slippery climbs while gently separating the riders inside from the cruel world outside.

It truly is a fantastic 4x4. But is it worth more than a million?

If –— like me — you have to ask, you can’t afford it. If you can afford the game farm that is the Range Rover’s natural accessory, buy it and go put scratches on those glossy doors.

That will make the Range Rover’s creators, engineers Charles “Spence” King and Gordon Bashford, very happy indeed.

Current competitors:

R 998 900, 4,5-litre Toyota 200 VX (173kW/615Nm)

R1 307100, Ranger Rover Vogue SE TDV8 (230kW/700Nm)

R1 875100, 2,9-litre V8 Mercedes-Benz G-Class AMG (373kW/700Nm)