This is old news by now, but I did find it interesting that they brought back a Land Rover guy from the BMW era. Dr. Ralf Speth. It would be great to hear from him on what input he had at the time and where they are now, compared to where BMW had been planning.
Also interesting is the consolidation of platforms for Jaguar & Land Rover. Jaguar has been very successful with their aluminum work; the synergy is great and will hopefully lead to higher profitability.
Here’s an interesting one, apparently the engineers at Land Rover have developed a set of technologies for use with Towing & Hitching. And it’s not just for Land Rovers.
The system is based around an auto-dimming rearview mirror with a 3.5” TFT display built into it. On that display, you can see the vehicle tire pressures, trailer tire pressures, trailer tire temperatures and finally a rear view camera to assist in the hitching. When the system is not in use, the LCD becomes invisible. While similar to the system available in the 2010 Land Rovers, this one does seem like it could be retrofitted, but that’s just my guess. And Trailair does better the Land Rover system with the live pressure/temperature readings – which are supposed to help with safety, tire life & even better emissions due to incorrect tire pressure.
![TrailAir_16[1]](https://i0.wp.com/www.ovalnews.com/wp-content/uploads/TrailAir_161.jpg "TrailAir_16[1]")
On sale this summer – you can read about it at :http://www.landrovertrailair.co.uk/
On a side note, there already is a company called Trailair and their website is trailair.com. They do air ride systems for RVs – I wouldn’t be happy with the name Land Rover chose if I was them.
Here’s a video from the LR UK site, it really puts the IP through it’s paces:
According to trucktrend.com, we’ll see the production version of the new smallest Range Rover this September at the Paris auto show.
While I’m not crazy about the name, I am looking forward to see how the production models styling turns out – there could be a lot of cues as to where they’re going with the next Range Rover and the entire line in general. Along with the visual design, we’re going to see what their plans are with regard to powertrains.
The Range Stormer back in 2004 gave us that same preview, even though the Sport had already been secretly designed. We saw Terrain Response, a Supercharged V8, headlight updates and a few other things.
http://www.trucktrend.com/features/news/2010/163_news100222_land_rover_lrx_paris/index.html