Land Rover Series II

Rover timed the Series II as a tenth-anniversary renewal, and the changes were a stylist's rather than an engineer's. The chassis, transfer box and axles were the 88 and 109-inch layout the Series I had reached in 1956; the axles were wider, which improved the turning circle, the rear springs were repositioned, the gearbox gained synchromesh on third and top, and the window perspex became glass. Around this David Bache drew a body five inches wider, its waist barrelled out to hide the width, with deep sills below the doors and a truck cab whose curved windows and rounded roof lasted until 2016. Hard tops on the earliest cars had no rear side windows and were painted body colour. The Dunsfold Collection's RSY 211, chassis 141800002, is one of the first 88s built and still has its 2.0-litre petrol engine: Solihull used up the Series I unit in the short-wheelbase car for the first months, and the 1958 Regular brochure, Publication 552, still quotes 1,997 cc and 52 bhp beside the 2,052 cc diesel. The 109 got the 2,286 cc engine — a bored-out development of the diesel block, rated by Wikipedia at 72 bhp — from the outset, and the Series 2 Club dates its arrival in the 88 to September 1958.

The registry's 1958 cars show how quickly the trade got hold of the new model. YAC 498, an early grey 109 press car with chassis 151800020, was sold to Peter Moy in May 1960 and became the only 109-inch Moy Conveyor, a powered luggage belt running the length of the vehicle; a Series I 80 prototype had been trialled by the Army in late 1958 and 88-inch versions went to BEA and BOAC at Heathrow. James Cuthbertson of Biggar put a complete Series II on four tracked bogies for peat and forestry work; the 1958 example RJB 102 is at the British Motor Museum. Rover's own Rail Rover put flanged wheels on an 88 hard top, and the Dale Bull-Angledozer hung a 66-inch hydraulic blade on the front. In Australia the Army's first Series 2s, 88-inch Command and Reconnaissance trucks in Deep Bronze Green, were delivered from December 1958.

The seven-seat 88-inch station wagon was in the range from April 1958; the 109-inch wagon followed in September, and the Dunsfold Collection holds the first production car, chassis 162000001, registered 8679 AC, ordered from the factory by a Northern Rhodesian forestry officer, collected in August 1959, shipped to Matadi and driven 2,000 miles through the Belgian Congo to Ndola. Its significance was fiscal as much as mechanical. Above the standard ten seats Rover offered a twelve-seat layout — six forward-facing, six on two inward-facing benches — and under British law a vehicle with twelve seats or more was a bus, exempt from purchase tax and Special Vehicle Tax. The twelve-seater was therefore cheaper than the ten-seater and cheaper than the seven-seat 88, and the layout survived on Solihull's utility station wagons until 2002. The old five-door 107 wagon, which had no Series II replacement until the new car reached full production, was kept on for export markets until late 1959; Winwaed notes that the cheaper twelve-seater then killed it.

Chassis numbers went to nine digits with the model year in the fourth position: 141 for the 88 petrol, 146 for the 88 diesel, 151 for the 109 petrol, 161 for the 109 station wagon. The new car went straight onto the expedition circuit. Three women took a 109-inch pickup — a Solihull demonstrator with 6,000 miles on it — over the Himalaya in 1958; the Toronto team's 88 station wagon La Cucaracha Cariñosa was hauled through the Darién Gap in 1959–60; a Series II 88 and a 109 pickup accompanied the Berliet trucks across the Ténéré the same winter, and Barbara Toy took a 109 in search of Sheba. A 1959 109 pickup later owned by Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz is in the registry, as is VAA 999, the bronze-green 1959 88 soft top Brian Bashall rebuilt in 1970 with a roll cage and 6.00×16 knobblies for the first Hillrallies of 1971 — the car that started the Dunsfold Collection's competition history.

Sales ran at 28,000 in the first full year and 34,000 in the next, and most of those cars went to work. In Britain the RAC put Radio Patrol 109 hard tops with roof boards and amber beacons on the road in 1959–60; Everyman's Garage of Chichester began recovering crashed racing cars at Goodwood in sky-blue 88s; Lincoln Electric hung its L.R. 150 welding generator under the tail of a 109 soft top, WAC 612, in 1960; and Trillo's of Whitby would later sell ice cream from a coachbuilt 109. The Forestry Commission's XLE 762, a 1959 109, became the first Forest Rover: Roadless Traction of Hounslow replaced the axles and fitted 10×28 tractor tyres so it could work over stumps, a fire tender for plantations. In Australia the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Authority ran a 1960 109 fire truck with Firefly equipment.

Service use was heaviest of all. The Australian Army's 109-inch ¼-ton fleet, assembled from CKD kits by Pressed Metal Corporation in Sydney, entered service from 1959, and on the same chassis the Army Design Establishment drew the tall insulated "Bloodbox" ambulance; Marshall of Cambridge built the British field ambulance body on the 109, and an 88 with its floor extended past the tailgate became the two-stretcher Forward Area Ambulance. The Royal Navy ran dark-blue 88 hard tops as airfield rescue vehicles, SSK 357 among them, and 109 station wagons for bomb disposal; Denmark's UN contingent in Cyprus used 12-volt 109 soft tops. The Cambridge Trans-American and Nagir expeditions and the second Berliet mission to Chad all ran Series IIs in 1960–61.

In September 1961 the diesel was bored out to match the petrol at 2,286 cc, the cooling system was revised, and the car became the Series IIA with an eight-digit chassis number beginning 2. Nothing visible changed, which is why the IIA is treated as its own marque here and why Series II records stop at the 1961 model year. The cab-over Forward Control of 1962 belongs to the IIA too: it used the 109-inch chassis and 2.25 petrol engine with the cab set over the engine, and Dunsfold's NXC 511D is the first production IIB 110 of 1966. How many Series IIs were built is not settled — see the production note — but on the annual figures the total is close to 110,000, and the model's short life makes a true 1958–61 car rarer than the IIA that followed.

The conversions kept coming on the Series II chassis for years. Martin Walter of Folkestone offered the 109 station wagon as a Dormobile motor caravan with its side-hinged elevating roof from 1961; Cintec built a Cineroma mobile cinema on a 109 wagon in 1962; the Post Office had USi Burtonwood fit a hydraulic tail lift to a single 109 pickup in 1963; RAEME workshops stripped 88s into 106 mm recoilless-rifle Gun Buggies in 1963–64. The registry's most recent Series IIs are a tray-back 109 Shop Truck run by the Brisbane restorer Jack Oliver Dobson and the Gastrowagon HEB 170X, a 109 turned mobile kitchen for television. The military, police and ambulance histories follow the type into the 1960s.