These guys have got some really great videos on how to do all sorts of things on your Range Rover, from changing the pollen filter to removing the door window switch surrounds.  They’re just short and to the point, but provide so much information.  They have some Range Rover Sport info too.

http://www.youtube.com/user/powerfulukltd

Here are two examples:

How to fit HST style front bumper upgrade to Range Rover Vogue:

How To Change Steering wheel on Range Rover L322:

Here are some more links I’ve collected and never got around to posting, some old, some new.

Electric / Hybrid Range Rover Projects:

Ultimate Green SUV: For $225K, Range Rover Electric Conversion

Electric Range-y Land

Liberty Electric Cars

Range_e (2013) – the hybrid electric Range Rover Sport

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QNX – The OS for the Virtual Instrument Panel

Land Rover 60 years – Anniversary Site

Land Rover Legacy Project

88inch.com – Land Rover Series IIA Restoration

OFF-ROAD WITH PH AND LAND ROVER

Recollections of former Land Rover Chief Engineer, Arthur Goddard

Engineer responsible for first Land Rover makes surprise visit to Britain

Arthur Goddard, who led the engineering team that developed the original Land Rover, has returned to Britain to celebrate the iconic 4×4 vehicle’s 62^nd birthday.

The 89-year old, who is still chief engineer of his family’s Australian-based trailer firm, last week visited Land Rover’s design headquarters, Solihull factory – his first visit for 55 years –and was also guest of honour at the special 62^nd birthday party at Gaydon organised over the May Day Bank Holiday weekend.

‘Solihull is unrecognisable from the factory I left in 1955,’ says Arthur. ‘Seeing the Defender coming down the production line however did bring back memories. It’s astonishing that a vehicle that was really developed as a “stop gap” should continue to be so successful, and has given birth to a thriving 4×4 company.’

Arthur joined Rover in 1945, initially to help develop a new tank engine. Once the war ended, the 24-year old was moved onto car engines. Soon after, in Easter 1947, Maurice Wilks had his brainwave for a pioneering all-terrain vehicle – the Land Rover.

Arthur’s responsibility was to design and to develop the vehicle, for production. Working under him were such Land Rover legends as Tom Barton and Frank Shaw (transmission), Gordon Bashford (chassis), Joe Drinkwater (engine) and Sam Ostler (body design).

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There are some great official sites where you can find just about any information you’d need for most models from the ‘90’s through today.

TOPIx – which is linked at the bottom of the landroverusa.com site and describes itself as:

TOPIx provides fast, online access to everything you need to enable you to deliver vehicle service and repair for Jaguar Land Rover customers.

The TOPIx site is great, it’s where you can find both owners manuals & service/repair info.  The owners manuals are free and don’t require registration.  The service/repair pages do require both registration and a subscription to the site.  Anyone can get a subscription and the prices vary depending on the info you want, how many models (i.e. all Land Rovers, a single model all years or a single model for one year), and how long you want access for(1 hour, day, week, month or year).  To give you an example, if you wanted to get the info for a 2008 Range Rover for 1 day, it’s $14, while all years for the New Range Rover for a day would be $23.  One more example, all models & years for a day is $46.

It can really be worth the money when you need some info you just can’t find anywhere else.  Like all the other sites, there’s not much thought put into the navigation design.  After selecting the model & year, you have to find the link that says Owner on the far right then find the link that says Owners Handbooks on the far left.  Then you’re stuck viewing a small frame on the page with the actual PDF content – lots of scrolling.  If you do select there “Maximise” icon, it just opens the PDF full screen, which is annoying in another way.

I would just assume with Land Rover sending people here directly from the home page for handbooks, it may make more sense to make the handbooks/Owners section front & center

Land Rover Owner Information

This is the site I’ve always used for Owners manuals and I think it is actually fewer clicks to the information you want when compared to TOPIx.  I’m not sure why Land Rover doesn’t link to this site directly off the home page, it’s just an easier site to navigate, but it doesn’t have service/repair info.

Here too you can find all sort of documents – the 2011 Range Rover Owners Handbook does reference this site, suggest for downloading the Land Rover Off-Road Driving handbook.

Owner Information Webshop

Here’s where you can buy actual hard copy printed materials – lost handbooks, wiring diagrams, etc…  As an example the full literature pack for a 2010 Range Rover is about $116.  This site is another one with an odd user experience – after registering, you just stare at a page that says “You’ve registered”, you have to find a small link in the corner to get you back to the content page, a redirect or larger, more obvious link couldn’t hurt.

All three sites are oddly designed with pop-ups and frames; which I assume is for some kind of I.P. protection, but with a little time, everything is downloadable, so they should just give us the option of downloading the entire PDF directly instead of all the clicking and waiting for each individual chapter.  On more then one occasion, I’ve had to close the window and start the process again because it just wouldn’t load a section, it gets old fast.

And even though the user interface/experience was a complete & terrible afterthought, I do thank them for putting all this info online.  Now why not put a small amount of effort into it and give us direct downloads.  Go check out how Mercedes-Benz does it and you’ll see how good & easy it could be.

Land Rover did their first-ever concept to preview a new production model back in 2004 with the Range Stormer.  It was our first intro into what would become the first addition to the Range Rover line – the Range Rover Sport.  The Sport was done when they showed the concept for the first time.  So it was more like they took a soon to be released vehicle and created a concept from it.  That’s all old news though, what I wanted to say today was something that caught me off-guard.  We’ve seen the Stormer since 2004 and the final 2-door Evoque was revealed back in June.  The Stormer always seemed to me as a blurry vision of the Sport, what I mean by that is, squint while looking at the Stormer from a distance and it’s a Sport.  However, if you really look at it today, it’s an Evoque with 2004-era Land Rover styling.  And I’m sure the 2-door version is biasing my opinion, but look at how many cues are there.  And I do of course realize they should have similar cues if they’re all basically “Range Rovers.

Look as those wheel arches that intersect the hood line.  Roof line looks closer to Evoque then Sport.  Hood louvers.

Big spoiler & Angular Exhaust – And they both seem to have glass roofs.

And I’ll close with a no longer valid & somewhat now sad quote from the 2004 Range Stormer Press Release:

Like all Land Rovers, the four-wheel drive is engaged permanently…

It’s the “Like all” part that really shows its age.

All of the pages have been converted to JPEG & add to the gallery:

2011 Range Rover – US Version

2011 Range Rover Sport – US Version

2011 Land Rover LR4

I realize this is a week or two old, I had re-tweeted it from Land Rover UK on August 20th.  I should have posted it here too – so for the record, here’s the video made up of shoots taken from a 2-door Range Rover Evoque photo-shoot in London.

I think this is actually the most we’ve ever seen of the rear of a non-camouflaged Evoque.  There aren’t any official rear shots I can find and in the press videos, they don’t do a full shot of the rear, just close-ups.  We saw the LRX from behind, but it is slightly different from that.  And the new shots do make it look like we may be getting the standard Range Rover split tailgate.

In addition, like all the 2010+ models, they’ve removed the rear Land Rover badge, however the model name has moved from the right side like the other Land Rovers to the left.

And finally, in these pics you can see both standard exhausts and more angular ones as well.  So maybe they’ll be doing an “LRX Edition” à la the “Stormer Edition” that they did for the Sport.

Well done video – I wish Land Rover would do a longer version themselves, as a real day in the life of the current Range Rover designer.  For a lot of the current line, he inherited the major designs, so it’s a lot of refining and tweaking so far.  I believe the Evoque was all under him, but I could be mistaken.  I can’t wait to see what he’s got planned the next Range Rover.

Does he normally wear a suit while working on the clay models?

Official shots from The Quail: A Motorsports Gathering: