Yahoo Autos Jump Inside An Original 1969 Velar Prototype
Looking at the current Range Rover lineup, especially the new Velar, it's fun to go back to the seventies, and marvel at how much has changed. You'll discover that early Range Rovers were weren't really luxury cars. For many years, they came with hose-down plastic interiors, manual gearboxes and a hole up front where you could hand crank its Rover V8 if it ever came to that.
But because the first-generation Range Rover remained in production for a whopping 26 years, it had enough time to evolve into the fancy SUV we all know today. The upgrades started with four doors, powered leather seats, an automatic gearbox and the option of a turbodiesel engine.
But back in the late-1960s, all Land Rover wanted was a two-door off-roader that was better suited for road use than the slow and uncomfortable Series IIA. After coming up with the design for that car, British Leyland took the letters from Alvis and Rover to disguise their 33 running prototypes and pre-production Range Rovers as VELARs.
While the seven original prototypes got crushed, Land Rover also produced 26 pre-production cars, which kept running around Great Britain in 1969 wearing the Velar branding. Jumping into one of those Velars today only shows that the name's pronunciation is far from being the most significant difference between the '69 and the 2018 version.
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