Whilst there has never been a period where the Range Rover has failed to be a successful marque, there have been periods of disruption around it, which often lead to a fundamental shift in focus.

In the 1970s, the Range Rover was highly successful, but after being pulled from the North American market, it inadvertently became less of a go-anywhere workhorse and more of an upmarket status symbol with a phenomenal engine and unparalleled capability.

A similar transformation took place leading up to the release of the first-generation Range Rover Evoque, which is perhaps the ultimate example of going to the customers rather than the customers going to you.

Following a decade where BMW and later Ford ultimately opted not to fix what was not broken, Tata Motors opted for a more radical approach once it bought the pieces of what would become Jaguar Land Rover.

The ambition of British Aerospace, then BMW and finally Ford was to create an entry-level Land Rover or Range Rover that emphasised style and on-road practicality over off-road credentials in order to break into the exceptionally lucrative North American crossover and SUV markets.

The answer was a replacement for the Land Rover Freelander, a capable compact SUV that had proven to be snakebitten when launched in the United States, ruining Ford’s plans to compete with the Toyota RAV4 and Jeep Liberty.

In 2008, around the time the JLR purchase was finalised, Land Rover unveiled the LRX concept car, a striking and remarkably sporty-looking SUV that resembled its larger siblings but signposted a future where the focus would be on the on-road experience.

In 2011, the newly renamed Evoque was launched, and it was an immediate and significant success. There were 18,000 pre-orders and nearly 90,000 sales in the first year alone, as well as winning several “Car of the Year” awards.

Much like the Discovery and the Freelander had achieved in decades past, the Evoque was not only an entry-level model that brought new success for Range Rover, but also signposted the style-focused and technologically advanced future for the company.