THE ROAD RULES

 

Title: Van Kills Range Rover Designer

 

Forty years ago, in June (1970), British Leyland Motor Company (BL) introduced the ‘Range Rover’, an off-road vehicle with a powerful V8 engine, a forgiving coil spring suspension, and a top highway speed of over 160 kmh. In no time it became an international status symbol and pop culture icon, an example of superior industrial design featured in the Louvre Museum in the early 1970’s.

In 1981, Range Rover became a hit in the fashion world after a luxury prototype appeared in Vogue magazine. Introduced to America in 1987, it quickly became the flagship model for Land Rover North America. In the early 1990s, a two-door, limited edition ‘Range Rover CSK’ was launched. Powered by a 3.9 litre, V8 engine paired with a five speed manual transmission (automatic transmission was optional) and new anti-roll suspension, only 200 units of the CSK were built, each individually numbered. The initials honoured the engineer who led the team that created the original Range Rover, Charles Spencer King.

 

In 1999, the Global Automotive Elections Foundation picked the Range Rover as one of the top cars of the century and Mr. King as one of the best engineers. And since then, the Range Rover has been celebrated in the lyrics of dozens of rap songs and in the movies including The Queen, the 2006 dramatization of the events following Diana, the Princess of Wales’ death in a car crash in Paris, and Quantum of Solace, the 2008 James Bond action flick.

Mr. King, who preferred around-towning in a Mini Cooper S, expressed regret about the Range Rover having become a status symbol. In 2004, he told the London Daily Mail, “Sadly, the four-by-four has became an acceptable alternative to Mercedes or BMW for the pompous, self-important driver. I find the people who use it as such deeply unattractive.’’

If Mr. King’s candid opinions offended, they did little to detract from his glowing reputation as one of the most highly regarded engineers in Britain. From his youthful apprenticeship, starting in 1942, at 17 years of age developing gas turbine engines for Rolls-Royce, through his maturation in the engineering department of the Rover Company—then led by his uncles Maurice and Spencer Wilks—through to his chairmanship of BL Technology from which he retired in 1985, he was, as one tribute described him, “the engineer's engineer. Whatever his cars were designed to do, they always exceeded the goals set for them.”

Post retirement, Mr. King remained passionate about the industry campaigning for lighter weight cars and for design improvements for better visibility. He called for thinner windscreen pillars or A-pillars, too-thick ones increasingly identified as a crash factor.

On June 26, 2010 Mr. King, aged 85, died in Coventry, England from injuries he sustained when he was hit by a van while cycling to do his daily errands. Prevented from driving by a detached retina, he was otherwise fit, one report saying, “he avoided elevators, preferring to take stairs two at a time well into his eighties.”