‘HERE IS A DESIGN CLASSIC’
New Rangie meets team CAR – and design critic Stephen Bayley
If you want things to stay the same, they must change. We owe that glorious paradox to Lampedusa’s classic novel of Sicilian decline, The Leopard. But it applies to Range Rover too.
When the David Bache original appeared over 50 years ago, we were still using shillings and pence. They announced that the Morris Minor was to be discontinued. And, in Year One of the SUV, Diana Ross’s Ain’t No Mountain High Enough was an on-message hit.
Now that 1970 car – where UX included a plastic and rubber interior that farmers could hose down – is in the Louvre, a design classic. Which is to say, permanent and universal. Does the new Range Rover pass that test?
One curiosity about design is that designers always want to tinker with things other people have made, but, at the same time, want to achieve a timeless ‘classic’ themselves. Between Bache and Gerry McGovern we have seen masterclass tinkering. The new Range Rover is the same, but also changed: customers are no longer hedge cutters, but hedge funders. So it speaks a different design language, one of emotional effects as much as matter-of-fact function.
Proportions are the expression of car-design genius and fine proportions are dicult to achieve on an SUV because height, bulk, ground clearance and short front overhang militate against them. Instead, the emotional effect here is in the surfacing, a term of art. Surfacing is dicult to define, but easy to detect: its presence says confidence and authority.
Yet… has the new Range Rover changed too much? Or not enough? Surely, it has energetically leapt the species barrier to escape its humble point of origin.
McGovern once told me that if Bentley can do a big SUV, then Range Rover can do a grand tourer. These quaint categories may seem irrelevant in an age when concentration has been fragmented by new media and personal transport is in the process of becoming stigmatised, if not yet prohibited. But here is a design classic: not, perhaps, permanent, just possibly universal.
BUYERS ARE NOW HEDGE FUNDERS NOT HEDGE CUTTERS