When Range Rovers first became officially available in the US back in 1987, the name of the car company here was, Range Rover of North America – prior to that, you could get Range Rovers, but I believe they were all grey market.  Here’s an ad from 1984, showing they were available.

Anyway, back to the focus of the post, just more notes on the separation that’s happening between Land Rover & Range Rover as brands.  From the slow removal of Land Rover badges from the Range Rovers to the branding they’re using on the web.  The actual Land Rover website has two distinct looks and logos depending on what models you’re looking at:

The thing to notice there is that “Range Rover” logo in the upper left of the page.  It’s those separate Land Rover / Range Rover logos that are showing up more often.  Here’s the cover & last page from the iPad version of the OneLife magazine.

I didn’t notice all this extra Range Rover specific branding until the Evoque launch, I probably just wasn’t paying close enough attention prior, but now I can’t miss it.  Especially when those first Evoque pictures were missing any type of Land Rover branding – a Land Rover badge did appear on the Paris show car.

And finally, back to that OneLife magazine/app, they seem to be very careful in talking about Land Rovers and Range Rovers as independent items which seems like a lot of PR editing. 

Directly from the Ratan Tata article:

Tata wants to broaden the Land Rover and Range Rover model range and further differentiate the two brands to attract more customers to the business.

I just wonder what that means exactly?   Is this going to be a Toyota/Lexus arrangement?  We currently only have two Land Rover models in the US.  If this grows with something like the still secret L486 project, where do the Land Rover models fit in?  Why not lose them and go all Range Rover?  Are they going to be a lot cheaper?  There will be a Range Rover at the $40,000 level with the Evoque and I know it’s not the LR4 segment, but what’s going to be the differentiator?  Is it just to help people with the confusion between LR & RR that happens at times?

Can someone explain?