A remarkable aspect of the original Range Rover is that, from its inception in 1970 up until its discontinuation in 1995, it only ever used one petrol engine.

The Rover V8 engine, through its various incarnations, was the powerful heart that drove the first two generations of Range Rover, as well as being the top-of-the-range petrol options for the Range Rover-derived Land Rover Discovery.

This is an astonishing lineage, which meant that its replacement was inevitably going to have a lot to live up to. However, the engine they chose and the circumstances that led to it are astonishingly bizarre.

The third-generation Range Rover, codenamed L322, was made during such a chaotic period of ownership of what was the Rover Group that no less than three separate ownership regimes were involved in it.

It was originally conceived shortly after the BMW takeover, with many of the engineers and upper management from the British Aerospace days still in charge as a replacement for the then-brand new P38A Range Rover (aka the Generation II model).

This new car, originally codenamed L30, was intended to be the first Range Rover to use the BMW M62 V8 engine, and was a chaotic joint production initially designed in Munich between Rover’s existing engineers and a team from their new Bavarian parent company.

The era of Rover under BMW would ultimately prove to be less than successful, and the company would be broken up and sold in pieces. 

BMW would keep the Mini, but would sell MG and Rover to a holding company and Land Rover to Ford.

The latter sale featured a clause that required BMW to remain involved until the Range Rover III entered volume production, leading to the bizarre situation that a BMW engine would power a car from a British marque owned by a major American carmaker.

This arrangement would last until 2006, when the car was updated and the engine replaced by the Ford-owned Jaguar AJ-V8.