Gavin Green, Mark Walton and Sam Smith

IN APRIL 70 YEARS ago, the Rover Company launched a civilian all-terrain vehicle aimed at farmers and those who worked on the land. The

‘Land’ Rover was a stopgap to earn easy cash until serious production could recommence, post-war, of luxury Rover saloons. It had minimal new tooling to save money. Simple (and cheap) wooden formers were used to shape the body. This is why it had so many simple shapes. (Why such an uncomplicated design remains beautiful when so many fussy modern SUVs are so ugly is surely a subject for all car design students to ponder.)

Land Rover, including Range Rover, is now the UK’s biggest and most profitable car brand. The Rover marque is long dead.

But the Land Rover isn’t the UK car industry’s only 70th birthday pin-up of 2018. Seventy years ago this October, the first sports car from the newly rebranded Jaguar Cars – the XK120 – starred at the Earls Court show.

These are key milestones for Jaguar Land Rover, now Britain’s biggest car maker. But there’s another important anniversary. March this year saw the 10th anniversary of Tata’s acquisition.

As with China’s Geely, and its successful transformation of Volvo, Tata invested heavily in distinctive new product. It gave JLR management a far freer rein than previous owner Ford. It invested in new platforms and engines, realising that premium cars should not share components with lesser vehicles. It invested in new factories, including in China. Jaguar and Land Rover became more British in design – and, paradoxically, more international in outlook.

But Tata’s finest moment came soon after the takeover, when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. Most car makers slashed investment, as sales and revenues collapsed. JLR, bankrolled by Tata, did the opposite.

‘Of course there were many moments when we wondered what we’d done,’ Ratan Tata told me a few years later. ‘We needed more products. With great new products the company had a chance. Otherwise, it had no chance. So we invested.’

With financing mostly from Indian banks, JLR began an ambitious new model programme, far exceeding anything that had gone before. It included the latest aluminium-bodied Range Rover and Range Rover Sport, the Jaguar F-Type and XE, and the Evoque, which become the fastest selling model in JLR’s history.

It was surely one of the most enlightened, if high-risk, corporate decisions in recent UK motor industry history. As the world awoke from recession, JLR had a host of new cars.

I first interviewed Ratan Tata in 2010 at his company’s global headquarters of Bombay House, in the heart of Mumbai’s business district. In India, his family name appears on more products than any other brand, from big trucks to small cars, from mineral water to mobile phones. But for a man whose name is everywhere in India, Ratan Tata likes to keep out of the limelight. He gives few interviews. Extravagances include (occasionally) taking the controls of one of the corporate jets (his uncle and predecessor as Tata chairman founded Air India). He also owns a Ferrari, in keeping with his enthusiasm for cars.

Back in 2007, after Ford announced its decision to sell Jaguar and Land Rover, CEO Geoff Polites met the suitors – including Tata. The Heritage Motor Centre in Gaydon was a strange place to greet potential new owners. It is the graveyard of the nation’s motor industry. They’re all there; from Austin to Triumph, Albion to Rover, Alvis to Wolseley. All the great old car names, all now gone.

Polites told the suitors the Heritage building had two floors. ‘On the ground floor below us are all the great old British brands in the museum. Every one of them is dead. They died because they didn’t change. But we’re up here on the first floor and we want to stay here.’ Poor Polites was suffering from cancer when he spoke, and died a month after the takeover.

Ratan Tata recently stood down as Tata chairman, having unobtrusively overseen one of the great car-industry transformations. Jaguar and Land Rover now prosper, their saviour an unlikely Indian businessman who must surely be the most important British motor industry figure of the past decade.