There are two iconic 4x4 vehicles - the Jeep and the Land Rover.
The Jeep won its image helping win World War II and then, thanks to the wide availability of surplus vehicles, with US farmers both as an iron workhorse and a recreational back country runabout.
The Land Rover evolved from a rather more stoic and impoverished post-war UK where the appeal of the utility of the Jeep was recognised, but the rusting examples to hand, plus a shortage of steel spurred the development of an improved design.
Both icons have survived through iterative design and successive ownership in the form of the Jeep Wrangler and the Land Rover Defender. Neither are perfect - the Wrangler is sporty by US standards, but is ill-mannered on road. The Defender is agricultural, unexciting and bum-numbing to drive any distance. Jeep fuel economy is woeful - it has improved something like 14% in two decades. The Land Rover fairs better thanks to early adoption and iteration of diesel as its preferred power plant - but not in a sporty way. However, both can be driven into wilderness, where paved roads end, and, with care, made to do useful tasks then driven back again. They can do it again tomorrow, come rain, snow or shine. If your job means you had better get to work whatever, then get a Wrangler or Defender, maybe with some aftermarket attention, and laugh yourself incontinent at the drowned soft roaders or the spinning low profile tyres going nowhere brigade.
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Both vehicles are now under threat from legislation to protect the world from man-made climate change and the stupid from the effects of stepping out in front of motor vehicles. The former is understandable - even if you cast doubt on the evidence for a primary anthropogenic cause for climate change it will still do no harm whatsoever to conserve fossil fuel and lower running costs. The latter legislation is just plain baffling when you consider that the equipment needed to save driver and passenger from the late night country road impact of a terminally stupid deer will likely not be that kind to a terminally negligent stupid old dear. Since when has it been the law's responsibility to overturn evolution and protect the fatally flawed? Cars go where cars go and if pedestrians choose to step in the way its a fair fight and the car wins. Roads evolved for carts and carriages and, ultimately, the horseless carriage - when you reclaim the streets you reclaim it for its rightful inheritor - the motor car! Give me pedestrian underpasses, wide sidewalks, bicycle lanes, Pelican crossings - just remember the car owners are paying for their roads.
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The upshot of new laws is that both vehicles need to undergo change. It is likely the front ends need more deformable plastic and designs that shed pedestrians in safe directions rather than hook them on the front or push them under chunky tyres. Yeah, good luck with that, and anyway that front mounted self recovery winch is still a mighty lump of metal thats going to f*ck with that plan good and proper. And no, we are not ditching the winch unless the respective governments of the world are offering a free helicopter recovery service to all off-roaders.
Weight needs to be shod - more so in the case of the Wrangler which, frankly, is a bit retarded in respect of using more modern materials. You can build car bodies out of nano paper and the Jeep is still, mostly, steel.
Engines need to improve -again, in the case of Jeep, more radically - the US has an ongoing love affair with dinosaur engine technology. The Hemi is an abomination before god when you consider what a decent European design house can do with an engine 1/3 the capacity and diesel to boot.
However, the biggest threat to the iconic status of these vehicles comes not from the legislation, but from management's reaction to it. Because the legislation is both a driver and excuse to neuter the two beasts and produce vehicles which respective focus groups have determined will appease the eco-maniacs and the pedestrian lobbyists and have "wider consumer appeal".
So let us re-write James Bond so he is no longer an urbane, over-confident, alcoholic, misogynistic, high functioning psychopath and instead recast him as a metrosexual, Guardian reading, neo-feminist who believes the world can be righted through a strongly worded letter writing campaign rather than the timely appliance of violence. No, lets not.
Let us remember that for both the Wrangler and the Defender that form follows function - that their appeal lies in having little in the way of concession to fashion. Its not that Wrangler and Defender drivers all like pretending they're soldiers - it is that their vehicles can actually deliver on the promises implied in those boxy bodies. There is a reason those vehicles look like that, that they're built like that and it has f*ck all to do with marketing and everything to do with ability.
The trick is to do some real work. Now is not the time to mellow appearances and shave of the legislatively tricky bits. Now is the time to work out how to get Range Rover road handling onto a wilderness worthy body. It is time to work out how to keep the wash down interior, but evoking (sic) the class of a Range Rover or a Jaguar. Now is the time to push the engines to the limit in technology - 40 mpg, 300 bhp, 450 fp torque? or something close. 0 - 60 mph under 8 seconds. Now is the time to understand what your real fans really like - like solid rear axles, flat windscreens, the ability to strip off the roof and doors. Now is the time to innovate - like fording ability to the door mirrors without aftermarket extras, LEDs for all the lights. Now is the time to strip off the dumb - lose the rusting chrome, the flaky paint on aluminium, the plastic bits that break off and keep it all solid and sensible.
The management of Jeep and Land Rover are playing Russian Roulette with a semi-auto pistol. If they pull the trigger the result will be an inevitable need to clean and redecorate the ceiling. Land Rover will survive - there are enough footballers' wives, Russian oligarchs and rising Chinese business managers with no sense of history that the Defender could go and only the cognoscenti would mourn its passing. For Jeep, however, the death of the icon would be terminal - just another also ran subsidiary of a global conglomerate. Jeep trades on its history - obliterate its history and you kill the brand. These are difficult times requiring real leadership and truly forceful visionaries - can either survive in the emasculated uniformity of the modern motor industry? YMMV and will almost certainly be cheaper!
