By far the most famous of all the Land Rover engines was the legendary Rover V8 that powered the First Range Rovers in 1967 and continued to be used in Land Rovers up until 2005, by which point it had changed hands five times.

The fact that an engine first produced in 1960 continued to be widely used for 45 years, far longer than any other V8 in its class is a testament to how forward-thinking the design was, as well as the difficulties of developing a genuine successor to it.

This was not necessarily a guarantee; the very last Rover car to use the Rover V8 engine was the SD1, one of the most revolutionary Rover cars ever made, as well as the last Rover car to use this lightweight, fast V8 engine.

The reason for this was due to a marriage of convenience; Rover entered a partnership with Honda in which both companies would work together on an executive saloon which would become the Rover 800 and Honda Legend respectively.

Rover would design the core structure and floor pan and Honda would supply the chassis design and V6 petrol engine. It was such a tightly connected partnership that it became a nightmare to undo once BMW bought the Rover Group in 1994.

Regardless, Rover would continue as part of BMW, even if the Rover V8 was exclusively used in the Land Rover Discovery and Range Rover rather than any part of the Rover line.

In 2005, the final mass-produced car with the Rover V8 engine would be the final Land Rover Discovery II, which ended not only the lineage of the Range Rover but the lineage of that engine. A coincidental bankruptcy of MG Rover would end that history as well.

However, Ford was keen to ensure that the engines continued to be produced, arranging for MCT in Weston-super-Mare to keep making them, whilst only the MG name from MG Rover would ultimately live on.