It is rather unfortunate that once Land Rover stepped out of the shadows of British Leyland and the Rover Group and started to add a lot more models to its product catalogue, the entire company and much of the British car industry would be surrounded by a degree of chaos.

There would be rapid changes in ownership, in structure and in the range of engines powering Range Rover and Land Rover vehicles, and perhaps no model characterises this chaotic period better than the third-generation Range Rover L322.

In some respects, the final Range Rover made with the “Car For All Reasons” ethos, the Range Rover III spanned three different periods of ownership before its final completion.

The very early preliminary work on the third-generation Range Rover took place whilst the Rover Group was owned by British Aerospace, a compromise to the aggressive privatisation and selling of the British motoring industry by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

The Rover Group was sold on the condition that it could not be sold again for another five years, and predictably once the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Day 1994, BAE sold to BMW, who aggressively developed its replacement in conjunction with the Rover Group.

This development took over six years in total, by which point BMW were trying to get out of owning the Rover Group themselves. They kept the Mini, but sold Land Rover to Ford (who also owned Jaguar at the time) and the rest was sold to the Phoenix Consortium to become MG Rover.

The sale of Land Rover included a provision that required BMW to continue developing the Range Rover III until it entered mass production, meaning that Ford was selling a car that was initially developed by British Aerospace and primarily developed by BMW.

Three separate owners within a single vehicle’s development cycle highlight the uncertainty surrounding Land Rover at the time, but by the time Jaguar Land Rover was sold to Tata Motors in 2008 and by the time of the fourth-generation Range Rover, there was far more stability.