For 50 years, when people uttered the words Land Rover there was only one possible vehicle they were talking about.

From its initial unveiling at the 1948 Amsterdam Motor Show until 1989, drivers, enthusiasts and people who traded in used Land Rover engines knew that if you were said those two magic words, you were referring to a specific car.

The first seeds of change began in 1984, when British Leyland, after nearly a decade of being run under state ownership, was privatised to form BL PLC, later to become the Rover Group but part of a separate entity due to the success of both Land Rover and Range Rover.

However, in 1989, just a year after the Rover Group was sold to British Aerospace, rumours had started to percolate about a second Land Rover coming onto the market, as a middle ground between the dependable and rugged Land Rover and the more expensive Range Rover.

The Range Rover, launched in 1970, was a big, wide and very successful 4×4 that became a sales juggernaut in the 1980s by moving upmarket, adding leather seats, power steering and electric windows.

This made it highly sought after in the United States, where the SUV was a popular institution, but at the same time, it led to a gap where the old Range Rover used to be, of a more affordable 4×4 to compete with the Toyota Land Cruiser and the Mitsubishi Shogun.

The result came at the 1989 Frankfurt Motor Show when the Land Rover Discovery was launched, becoming the very first Land Rover that was not part of the series that traced its roots back to 1948.

A year later, what had been known as the Land Rover 90/110 became the Defender, as with the Discovery the original Land Rover required a name, although it was still related to that initial model and would remain so until the final original Defender rolled off the assembly line in 2016.