It is difficult to talk about Land Rover and the incredible longevity of the models they made in the marque’s early years without discussing the engines that kept them moving as years turned into decades.

Ultimately, of the many engines that have powered a Land Rover or Range Rover over the years, the first one that comes to mind for any long-time enthusiast is the venerable and legendary Rover V8.

Initially made by Buick in 1961 and a relative failure in Detroit, Rover bought the tooling in 1965 and by 1967 it had become an exceptionally common powerplant not only for Rover and other parts of the British Leyland empire but also for kit car manufacturers and British independent carmakers.

However, everything must come to an end eventually, and by the 1990s, what was once a lauded, lightweight and powerful engine had been eclipsed by superior engines produced by BMW, Jaguar, Ford and other manufacturers.

Rover themselves had stopped using their own V8 as early as 1986 with the discontinuation of the Rover SD-1, the last car completely produced in-house, with all of the parts produced by Rover themselves, and whilst Land Rover used it in the 1990s, by the 2000s, it was showing its age.

Unlike modern V8s of the era that used overhead cams, the Rover V8 used a pushrod that was impossible to change without essentially creating a new engine, something Land Rover’s owners BMW and later Ford were hardly likely to do given they had their own V8 engines.

Whilst the Rover V8 is still produced in limited quantities to keep older Land Rovers going the final mass-produced vehicle to use the Rover V8 when it was discontinued in May 2004 was the second-generation Land Rover Discovery.

Rather fittingly, the Discovery II was also the last Land Rover that had a direct connection to the original Range Rover, given that it shares many of its designs and parts with it.