STEPHEN BAYLEY

The Aesthete

The new SVAutobiography will be admired long after the original 1970 Range Rover has been forgotten, but not before. It seems appropriate that this strange car was launched in Los Angeles, a city where gross consumption vies with terminal congestion in the Department of Distressing Adjectives and Metaphors. Godless? Greedy? Gehenna? Hell?

Immediately I saw the car, I thought of Coco Chanel’s apothegm: ‘Luxury is not the opposite of poverty, it is the opposite of vulgarity.’ I trust the ghost of Chanel on absolutely everything, I consult her often, and would pit her against JLR’s marketeers any day. If the SVAutobiography is luxury, give me rubber mats.

In case you were not in LA, the new Range Rover is inflated in all dimensions: size, price, aspirations. This is not social climbing, it’s social mountaineering. I dare say it is fitted with mountain ascent control which has been permanently disabled. It has 1.2 metres of rear leg-room and 40 degrees of recline, hot stone massage (honestly), a wine fridge, 4G comms and a powered luggage deck so the liveried flunky at the Chateau Marmont does not have to sweat over your Globetrotters.

Strikes me that Range Rover’s Gerry McGovern in his severely waisted Anderson & Sheppard suit has the role of Faust in this consumerist playlet. Sulphur-breathed Mephistopheles has led him up Mount Lukens, highest point within LA city limits, and waved his Satanic claw at the vista south towards Pasadena, Glendale and Hollywood, saying, ‘Gerry, all of this can be yours. High-end shopping! Big watches! Destination restaurants! A-listers! Only first you have to do something really, seriously daft.’

Rationale for the SVAutobiography must have been that if Bentley can make an off-brand four-wheel-drive, then Range Rover can make a fantabulosa obscenely powerful gentleman’s express with engine-turned knobs on. This, I think, may be eloquent of the conceptual chaos in these very last days of the motor car. As The Age of Combustion approaches its midnight, designers are not considering practicalities, they are considering extremities. I fear the SVAutobiography has many extremities. It is a harbinger of things-to-come.

Land Rover’s transition from Anglesey and mud to La Cienega Boulevard and Bottega Veneta has been handled with skill and tact, an adroit bargain between the essential brand proposition and intelligent ambition. The same process occurred when Philip Payne’s 1994 Dodge Ram was repositioned as aspirational rather than functional and sales went up 300%. It’s always important to avoid Marketing Myopia: that’s why the old American railroads went bust, insisting they were in the train business when really they were in the transport business. Santa Fe and Burlington Northern should have become airlines, then all would have been well.

To be sure, the Land Rover customer no longer comprises inbred zoophiliac Welsh farmers (who prefer the Toyota HiLux) but status-hungry Angelenos who practise anti-gravity aerial yoga. But at some point in this transition, a line was crossed and sophistication became decadence. The Range Rover SVAutobiography is way too far on the wrong side of that line. It may now be in artistic terrain so treacherous that no amount of long-travel suspension or trick differentials or heavybreathing press releases can guarantee escape.

Intimidating Paris intellos recognised the 1970 Range Rover as art and put it on display in the Louvre’s Musée des Arts Decoratifs. Design-wise, this is where you want to be, not demonstrating your PDVLF (Power Deployable Veneered Loadspace Floor) to the doorman at the Hotel California.

I know exactly what the great moments in car design were: Harley Earl realising that wider rolls of strip steel allowed imaginative sculpture; Pininfarina creating the ‘GT’. Patrick Le Quement’s category-busting Renault Scénic is on my shortlist, so is the ’64 Mustang, which gloriously democratised fantasy. I also enjoy Dante Giacosa’s asymmetric driveshafts on the Fiat 128 and, of course, his of 1957 remains incomparable. Malcom Sayer had his moment too.

But the PDVLF? This compares in the history of design to the moment Alejandro de Tomaso rode into the Modenese courtyard of Maserati on his Benelli Sei and, waving a Beretta, fired everyone. Someone at Range Rover deserves to be shot.

‘THIS RANGE ROVER MAY BE ELOQUENT OF THE CONCEPTUAL CHAOS IN THESE VERY LAST DAYS OF THE MOTOR CAR’

STEPHEN BAYLEY Author, critic, consultant, broadcaster, debater and curator, Stephen cocreated the Boilerhouse Project at London’s V&A, was chief executive of The Design Museum, and fell out with Peter Mandelson when he told him the Millennium Dome...