Velar FirstEdition
Ken Gratton7 Aug 2017
NEWS

Land Rover on a 'journey of transformation'

How a vehicle looks and what it says about its owner are crucial to its sales success, says Land Rover design boss

Land Rover is a long-established brand, but in its current guise it's nothing like the company founded in 1948 to sell off-road vehicles to farmers in the UK.

Its first brand shift came with the original Range Rover in 1970. Discovery was another milestone along the path to a new image, but with the company's sale to Tata that progression has picked up pace.

"Land Rover is certainly on a journey of transformation," Chief Design Officer Gerry McGovern told Australian journalists attending the global launch of the Range Rover Velar (pictured) two weeks ago. "We've come from being a specialist brand to more of a universally broader appealing brand."

Although McGovern didn't say in so many words, the Range Rover Evoque has opened up the brand to female buyers who might not have previously considered buying a Land Rover.

"I think we've already demonstrated that Land Rover as a brand can stretch," McGovern says. "I mean, who'd have thought we'd have a car like this [Velar] for Range Rover? Who'd have thought that we'd even have an Evoque? I remember when we developed the Evoque they said I was around the twist.

"We'll sell 20,000 of those, the marketing guy said to me. We haven't seen him for a while. 130,000 a year for seven years..." McGovern drily remarked.

"That car saved us."

Land Rover's three-family design strategy, far from keeping the lines "disparate" and distinct, brings the three lines closer to each other than was the case in the past, before Freelander morphed into Discovery Sport and became part of the Discovery family, to use one example.

Entwined within brand image is vehicle design. And design seamlessly feeds into the three-family strategy. Elements like utility, crash safety and aerodynamics can influence how a vehicle looks, but there's still plenty of latitude for the designer to be creative with the end product, according to McGovern. However, restyling a car with a well-established presence in the market – such as the Range Rover, for instance – is a bigger challenge than starting afresh for a vehicle like the Velar.

"Let's put the aerodynamics to one side for a moment... we've got these three different families, which I think enable us to differentiate them – Range Rover, Discovery and Defender – and that will all make sense when that all comes together. And within those families there has to be a hierarchy.

"So Range Rover is... the crown jewels, and it's the things like formality, elegance, sophistication. The levels of those you dial up between one vehicle to another that creates that hierarchy of positioning. And incidentally, when I first came into the business, we never worked in that way; it was do one vehicle at a time.

"With Tata coming along and the way they invested in us, they afforded us the ability to look at this brand and 'future' it holistically so we understood what were all these things coming, and how could they relate to each other…"

These days, design and branding are the two key aspects of any vehicle that set it apart from its rivals, says McGovern.

That's particularly true of Land Rover's families – Range Rover, Discovery and Defender. Models within those families (and some of Jaguar's model lines too) share platforms and drivetrains, but it's how they look and what they stand for that distinguishes them. The Jaguar F-PACE and the Range Rover Velar are classic examples of the syndrome.

Even between unrelated brands, volume-selling cars are moving upmarket and the whole automotive industry is developing robust technology that's also affordable across the entire market spectrum. This convergence will force manufacturers – particularly prestige manufacturers – to focus ever more effort on brand management and design.

McGovern prides himself on being a 'designer', not a 'stylist'. The latter is all about fiddling around at the edges, placing a line here or there, he says. A 'designer' has a much broader overview. And that makes him the right person for the job at a company with design morphing to match the brand image.

McGovern argues that in the Land Rover context, design and engineering are equal partners, whereas in other companies engineering comes first – and design is secondary to that in the product development hierarchy.

"We're not just preoccupied with the overall surface, we're preoccupied with the way the car is designed in the overall sense – and that clearly is fundamental in the way you proportion the car in the first place, together with the interior volumes, the packaging, the seating… all those sorts of things."

So there's a collaborative effort going on between designers and engineers within Land Rover's product development team. With engineers given an equal say in the way a car evolves from concept to production, functionality remains a significant factor in the design parameters, and McGovern admits that functionality can be an appealing trait in vehicle design.

"Of course it can... I'm not saying it's not. When people think of 'functional', think of 'utility', they generally think of 'cheap', but you can have really high-end... sports equipment, diving gear, all these sorts of lifestyle products that are incredibly durable and functional – incredibly expensive as well."

Although McGovern didn't want to discuss the Defender replacement, which is believed to be still two to three years away from production, his statement suggests that the new model in the utilitarian family promises to be much more stylish than the Defender – or the DC100 concept that failed to gain traction among Land Rover fans.

The take-out from this is that the next Defender will be stylish in ways that the original Land Rover never was... but it will still be 'a Defender'.

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Written byKen Gratton
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