Land Rover
The Land Rover was designed by the Wilks brothers (at that time Rover was owned by the Wilks family) who had a farm in Anglesey where they drove around in their WW2 Willys Jeep. The very first prototype still had a lot of "borrowed" parts but in the real production they were replaced by british ones. The center steering was still a testimony to the agricultural tractors and was intended to eliminate the need to produce left- and right-hand steering vehicles for different markets.
A good idea but it proved impractical in real world so it was dropped on later vehicles. The chassis of the first prototype was an Willys chassis, but on the first pilot-production vehicles it was already made of 4 flat iron plates welded together thus elininating the need for expensive jiggs. For similar reasons the panels were made of flat aluminium (iron was still short). The vehicle was thought of as a stop-gap to overcome the hard time until steel would be available again and Rover could go back into car building. Laws at that time forced a certain amount of production to be exported to regain economical strenght and the cars simply were not desired elsewhere in sufficient numbers.The Land Rover was designed by the Wilks brothers (at that time Rover was owned by the Wilks family) who had a farm in Anglesey where they drove around in their WW2 Willys Jeep. The very first prototype still had a lot of "borrowed" parts but in the real production they were replaced by british ones. The center steering was still a testimony to the agricultural tractors and was intended to eliminate the need to produce left- and right-hand steering vehicles for different markets.
This is topic is important for the off road lovers.
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