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    Land Rover
      was granted a Royal Warrant by King George VI in 1951,and 50 years later,
      in 2001, it received a Queen's Award for Enterprise for outstanding
      contribution to international trade.Over time,
      Land Rover
      grew into its own brand (and for a while also a company), encompassing a
      consistently growing range of four-wheel drive, off-road capable models.
      Starting with the much more upmarket 1970 Range Rover, and subsequent
      introductions of the mid-range Discovery and entry-level Freelander line
      (in 1989 and 1997), as well as the 1990 Land Rover Defender refresh, the
      marque today includes two models of Discovery, four distinct models of
      Range Rover, and after a three-year hiatus, a second generation of
      Defenders have gone into production for the 2020 model year—in short or
      long wheelbase, as before.
  
 
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    Originally, these vehicles were simply called the 'Land Rover' – an
      off-road capable car model of the Rover Company. As 'Land Rover' became
      established as a brand, the 'Series' indication later became a retronym
      model name. The Range Rover was introduced in 1970, and the company became
      a British Leyland subsidiary in 1978. In 1983 and 1984, the long and the
      short wheelbase Land Rovers were finally given official names – the One
      Ten, and the Ninety respectively, and together they were badged the
      Defender models in 1990, after the 1989 introduction of the new Discovery
      model.
  
 
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    Land Rover conversion to fight forest fires, Cascina, Italy (August
      2016)
  
 
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    The design for the original vehicle was started in 1947 by Maurice Wilks.
      Wilks, chief designer at the Rover Company, on his farm in Newborough,
      Anglesey, working in conjunction with his brother Spencer who was the
      managing director of Rover. The design may have been influenced by the
      Jeep and the prototype, later nicknamed Centre Steer, was built on a Jeep
      chassis and axles.The early choice of colour was dictated by military
      surplus supplies of aircraft cockpit paint, so early vehicles only came in
      various shades of light green. Starting with the series I Land Rover, all
      models in this era featured sturdy box-section ladder-frame chassis. Early
      vehicles like the Series I were field-tested at Long Bennington and
      designed to be field-serviced.
  
 
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    In 2006 Ford also purchased the Rover brand from BMW for around £6
      million. BMW had retained ownership of the brand to protect the integrity
      of the Land Rover brand, with which 'Rover' might be confused in the US
      4x4 market, and allowed it to be used under licence by MG Rover until it
      collapsed in 2005, at which point it was offered to the Ford Motor
      Company, who by then owned Land Rover. On 11 June 2007, Ford announced
      that it planned to sell Land Rover along with Jaguar Cars. Private equity
      firms such as Alchemy Partners of the UK, TPG Capital, Ripplewood
      Holdings, Cerberus Capital Management and One Equity Partners of the US,
      Tata Motors of India and a consortium comprising Mahindra & Mahindra
      of India and Apollo Management all initially expressed interest in
      purchasing the marques from the Ford Motor Company. On 1 January 2008,
      Ford formally declared that Tata was the preferred bidder. On 26 March
      2008, Ford announced that it had agreed to sell its Jaguar and Land Rover
      operations to Tata Motors, and that it expected to complete the sale by
      the end of the second quarter of 2008.