Road Roving

In my most recent unsung heroes piece I suggested the Matra Rancho may have been the world's first crossover. As a production car that is probably true, but I have been reminded of another project that predated the Rancho by more than two decades. It never made production but came very close and had it done so could certainly have been considered an ancestral crossover. The vehicle I'm talking about is the Road Rover, which you may not have heard of before so read on for the full story...

Road Rover? Don't you mean Range Rover?

No, the Road Rover was a completely different project that came well over a decade before the Range Rover, although it was broadly similar in concept. While the Land Rover was selling well, Rover bosses Maurice and Spencer Wilks were concerned that demand for such a utilitarian vehicle would slow down as the post-war economy continued to improve, so a more civilised sister model would be needed to fill the gap. Development of the Road Rover began in 1951 and it was felt that on-road comfort was more important than outright off-road ability, so designer Gordon Bashford sacrificed the Land Rover's four-wheel-drive in favour of using the RWD chassis from the Rover P4 saloon.

The Road Rover was conceived as a rugged utility station wagon, and to keep production costs low the bodywork would be made up entirely of flat panels; early designs resembled Postman Pat's van but by 1955 had been developed into something a little more attractive. The Series I Road Rover could hardly be considered stylish though and was very much a functional design in the mould of its off-road counterpart. It reached the running prototype stage, but the Wilks brothers' fears of a drop in Land Rover sales were proving unfounded so the Road Rover became a low priority and development continued at a slow and measured pace. 

The first iteration of the Road Rover - practical but not pretty

By 1956 the Land Rover station wagon had appeared so the Road Rover changed tack with the Series II version, which was aligned more closely with the Rover saloon range rather than the Land Rover. It did away with the simple boxy bodywork in favour of a far more stylish appearance akin to an American station wagon but also with similarities to the forthcoming P5. Underneath it now featured disc brakes and the independent front suspension of the P5, and the wheelbase was lengthened to give sleeker proportions, but it was still only a two-wheel-drive vehicle. This second-generation Road Rover reportedly came very close to production: nine prototypes were built and productionisation work took place with the aim of a probable launch in 1960, but this never happened and the project quietly died.

So why did the Road Rover never make it to market? It seems it simply wasn't that important to Rover, as the Land Rover continued to thrive and development effort was concentrated on this and the popular P5 and P6 saloons instead. How well it would have sold is a matter for debate as a two-wheel-drive utility vehicle was a new concept and the company's predictions forecast adequate but not huge numbers, so it was unlikely to have quickly repaid its development cost and dropping it may have been the right decision. On the other hand, the Land Rover had only been intended as a stop-gap but unexpectedly became a massive success, so the same could have happened with the Road Rover. We'll never know though.

The idea of a more civilised companion to the Land Rover never really went away, and the seeds sown by the Road Rover eventually bore fruit in 1970 with the appearance of the Range Rover. The rest is history, but the Range Rover is a proper 4x4 that created a whole new market sector for what are now called sport-utility vehicles and no one would consider it a crossover like its spiritual predecessor might have been. In 1977, the Rancho was launched and when you think about it actually had a lot in common both with modern crossovers and also with the stillborn Road Rover - all are rugged and chunky-looking utility vehicles that appear to be off-roaders but are based on the running gear of a conventional two-wheel-drive car.

Much better than the Series I. This very nearly made it into production but would it have been a success?

What happened to the Road Rovers?

The Road Rover prototypes were fully working and road-legal vehicles. The number of Series I cars is unconfirmed (one source suggests 12 or 13) but it is generally agreed that nine Series IIs were built and what happened to most of them remains unclear. The majority were probably scrapped by the company when the project finally bit the dust, but there are a few known exceptions. An early Series I was apparently used for a while by its designer Gordon Bashford as his personal transport in the late 1950s, and at least one of the Series II examples also allegedly saw use as a Rover company car. The last Series II, the grey one now at Gaydon, was kept by Spencer Wilks for many years and used on his estate on the Isle of Islay.

Happily, examples of both Series I and II prototypes survive in the care of the British Motor Museum at Gaydon. The blue Series I car (SNX 36) of 1955 has been in the collection since before the museum opened, but as far as I know had never been on public display until it was moved into the new Collections Centre this year. It can now be seen there but don't believe the information card on the vehicle as when I last visited it was incorrectly labelled as the 1959 Series II. The latter is the ninth and final example, a grey car registered 3411 AC, and used to be on display in the main museum but was no longer present on my most recent visit so I assume it is currently either stored off-site or away for restoration work

There are no other known surviving Series I vehicles, but Series II prototype number eight also exists overseas in private ownership. This green one (XWD 521) and the Gaydon car apparently both spent many years languishing in a London garden with their owner resisting all attempts to buy them for restoration. They narrowly avoided the scrapman following his death around fifteen years ago, being saved by an enthusiast at short notice when the property was cleared as the executors seemingly didn't realise their significance. Both are in need of extensive restoration but are in good homes as the current owner of the green one is said to be a large-scale collector of unusual Land Rovers.

The back looks quite American. Styling is frankly a bit odd.

The Corgi connection

The Road Rover is also an infamous example of the consequences to others when a car manufacturer cancels a new product at a late stage. Corgi Toys had been working in secret alongside Rover with full access to the technical drawings to develop a toy version of the Series II Road Rover, the launch of which would coincide with the real car and help to publicise it. Like the real thing this came very close to production, with a catalogue number (212) allocated, tooling made and the box art designed, but Rover's cancellation of the project meant Corgi had to scrap all this work on their miniature replica too. Of the six pre-production samples, Corgi chief designer Marcel van Cleemput kept one for his personal collection and the other five were destroyed, and van Cleemput revealed the previously untold story in his 1989 Great Book of Corgi.     

The Road Rover eventually led to this. It's definitely an SUV and not a crossover.

That then is the tale of what could potentially have been the first crossover, and moves the genesis of the idea another couple of decades further back from the Rancho. As the old saying goes, there's nothing new under the sun, and what was considered a bad idea in its day may resurface a long time later and become a great success. That certainly seems to be the case with the Road Rover, which would fit very well into the modern crossover category that didn't even exist for another half a century after it was conceived. One has to wonder what could have been had it gone into production...