At 10:13 AM -0700 6/29/01, Faure, Marin wrote:
>Someone suggested the Land Rover was sized deliberately to
>fit through the farm gates in the UK. I suspect this was not actually
>a consideration. The Land Rover was sized to be the same as the
>Jeep it was based on, as well as the average width of other vehicles
>of that day. Vehicles on the whole were smaller and narrower
>in the 1940s than they are today. It had nothing to do with gate
>clearances, it was just the way vehicles evolved.
<snip>
> There are already enough bogus beliefs and theories floating around about
>the Land Rover. Let's not add another one.
Yes, let's be careful about this, we wouldn't want to have someone on
a list somewhere be putting out bad information of a critical topic
such as this. ;-)
They are not the same even though the Land Rover was based on the
Jeep. For the record Marin; from Graham Robson's 1976 "The Land
Rover, Workhorse of the World"
page 23:
47 Land Rover Willy Jeep
Wheelbase 80" 80"
Length 132" 133"
Width 60" 62"
Track 50" 48"
I don't know why the Land Rover was narrower and I'd never heard of
the farm gate theory but I do know that a Land Rover fits very nicely
down the rows of grape vines in the traditional vineyards of Northern
California. My theory is that they were designed just for vineyards
and that when the new mechanized harvesting forced vintners to change
the row widths in 1974 it allowed larger vehicles access. Realizing
their marketing disadvantage British-Leyland decided to pull out of
the US Market. Isn't that the way it happened?
Gerry Mugele
*** "It's not on any map - true places never are." -- Mark Twain
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Jun 29 2001 - 18:43:53 EDT