Land Rover Series III

The Series III launch was a matter of grille, dashboard and gearbox rather than chassis. Rover's engineers had already tried a Rover P6 2200TC engine in a 1970 Series III test car and built a pre-production long-wheelbase in 1971, both now at Dunsfold, but the production vehicle kept the IIA's running gear with the all-synchromesh box as its one real mechanical advance — a gearbox said by some owners to be weaker than the IIA's. From 1972 the Salisbury rear axle became standard on every 109, the Series III version of the Army's Lightweight replaced the IIA one, and the 1-Ton 109 continued until 1977. FXC 863L, 'the Birdcage', was a 1972 88 pick-up shown at the Motor Show and then put to work at Solihull as a winch-cable test truck. Factory sales to North America, never large, ceased in 1974.

The fleets bought it as they had bought the IIA. HCB-Angus built the TACR1 rapid-intervention crash tender on uprated 1-Ton chassis for the RAF and Royal Navy from 1970 to 1976; Herbert Lomas bodied the Worcestershire Ambulance Service's HUY 944K in 1971–72; Carmichael of Worcester converted a 1975 Series III to its Redwing FT/5 fire specification; the Danish Army fitted a 1971 109 with a Sylvania telephone-exchange shelter; and the Royal Artillery ran 25 FG 73 as a photographic-interpretation vehicle. By the late 1970s the British Army had bought around 9,000 Series IIIs, mostly a heavy-duty 109 soft top with its own suspension and cross-member design in 12-volt GS and 24-volt FFR forms — the vehicle the registry lists as the UK military 109. Long-wheelbase Series IIIs also served the Royal Hong Kong Police in their hundreds, and Belgium's army took 88 staff cars in 1974–75 with 4×2 transmissions and limited-slip differentials.

In June 1976 the one-millionth Land Rover left Solihull: a Series III 88 station wagon finished in a non-standard metallic green, now on display at the British Motor Museum. The lrfaq.org tables give 1976 as a year of 48,514 Land Rovers, with Range Rover output — 12,207 that year — now a significant second line. Two years later British Leyland's restructuring hived the 4×4 business off as Land Rover Limited, the first time the vehicle had a company of its own. The registry's civilian records of these years are the Series III at its most ordinary and most recognisable: Fred Dibnah's red 1976–77 truck cab THP 36R, signwritten for the steeplejacking business; Rossi's Ice Cream's 1974 109 UPJ 934M with its tall van body; the AA's 1976 109 station wagon in all-over yellow; the 1977 blue 88 that became James Bond's Jamaican runabout in No Time To Die; ST Engineering's 1977–78 recovery truck THM 834S; and the Post Office telephones 88 of 1976–77 that ran on four triangular Snowtrac track units.

Australia had its own troubles. Land Rover had held ninety per cent of the country's four-wheel-drive market in the 1960s, but from the middle of the 1970s a coal-for-cars trade with Japan, poor-quality kits from Britain and Leyland Australia's inability to build enough vehicles at Enfield handed the fleets to Toyota and Nissan. Leyland Australia's answer in the mid-1970s was the GAME, an up-market short-wheelbase Series III for the recreational buyer with fifteen-inch white-spoke wheels, wheel-arch extensions, a swing-away spare carrier and a radio-cassette, sold only in 'Yellow Devil' with a white roof; it did not sell and was dropped in 1979. Denmark ordered 88 general-service soft tops in 1977, in service from 1978, and HM Coastguard began the run of blue-and-yellow 88s — cliff-rescue car TYO 286S of 1977–78 first — that appear throughout the rescue history.

The Stage 1 took its name from the first stage of a government-backed investment programme for Land Rover Limited, and it existed because the Toyota Land Cruiser and Nissan Patrol, with powerful six-cylinder engines, were taking Land Rover's markets in Australia and Africa. Eleven 109 prototypes were built between early 1976 and mid-1977, one of them a left-hand-drive hot-weather car in export brown that survives at Dunsfold, and the production vehicle went on sale in 1979. It combined the Range Rover's 3.5-litre aluminium V8, detuned from 135 to 91 bhp, with the Range Rover and 101 Forward Control's LT95 four-speed gearbox and lockable centre differential, so it was the only Series Land Rover with permanent four-wheel drive; the longer drivetrain pushed the radiator forward to a flush grille, the face the One Ten would inherit. The leaf springs stayed. The six-cylinder 109 was dropped in mid-1980, and in the same year the 2.25 fours were re-engineered with five main bearings and the transmission, axles and hubs strengthened, the last of a series of fixes for the 109's chronic half-shaft breakages.

Most Stage 1s were exported. The 88-inch version was rare enough that its number is disputed: Wikipedia says 24 were built, while Dunsfold records four prototype 88s of 1981 on modified Series III chassis, two truck cabs sent to the Middle East and two station wagons, one of which, HOJ 573W, survives at the collection. New Zealand's army bought 566 Stage 1 109s, in service 1982–86, and Australia offered the same vehicle from 1982 with a 3.9-litre, 97 bhp Isuzu 4BD1 diesel in place of the V8. The Stage 1 also carried the marque's last expeditions: two Land Rovers on the Transglobe Expedition's Sahara crossing in 1979, one of them Ginny Fiennes' HF radio station, and a fleet of new Stage 1s on the Royal Geographical Society's International Karakoram Project in 1980. The V8 chassis went straight to the converters: British Gas's 109 van with a telescopic mast, the Royal Australian Navy's fire utilities, and the six-wheel Hotspur and Sandringham conversions described in the police and military histories.

In April 1982 Land Rover introduced the County station wagon on both wheelbases — cloth seats from the Leyland T-45 lorry, soundproofing, tinted glass and side decals, the first Series Land Rover trimmed for a leisure buyer, and a name that lasted into the Defender era — together with the High Capacity Pick Up, a 109 with a load bed of 25 per cent more volume and heavy-duty suspension that utilities and builders took to at once. The same year the rear half-shafts went from 10 to 24 splines, which all but ended the breakages. Gwent Fire Brigade's PHB 645Y is a 1982 109 appliance; SEEBOARD and the Southern Electricity Board ran six-wheel Stage 1 line-tensioners and cherry-pickers rebuilt by Hotspur in 1983–84; HM Coastguard's KYU 893X of 1981–82 and A259 SYM of 1983–84 are the 88s of the marque's last years.

The Series III's best-known outing came at the end. For the 1983 Camel Trophy in Zaire the seven competing teams drove 2.25 diesel Series III 88 station wagons with 109 support cars, the event's first Land Rovers after two years of Range Rovers; the Dutch pair Henk Bont and Frans Heij won, and in 1984 the teams moved to the new One Ten. The One Ten itself had arrived in 1983 on coil springs, and in Australia the Toyota Land Cruiser became the best-selling 4×4 that year. In Spain, Santana's parallel line of Series-derived vehicles — entirely locally made since 1968 and, from 1977, available with the company's own 3,429 cc six-cylinder diesel, which the registry catalogues as the Santana diesel — had by now diverged far enough that Land Rover and Santana ended their non-compete agreement in 1983, though the licence itself ran to 1990.

The Ninety followed the One Ten in 1984 — June, by John Brown 4x4's account — and the short Series III was effectively finished; the lrfaq.org tables put Series III output at 5,800 88s and 9,600 109s in 1983, 4,000 in 1984 and 3,000 in 1985 as remaining fleet and export orders were worked through, against 21,562 and 28,046 coil-sprung vehicles in those years. The Lightweight ended in 1984 after 37,897 of both series. Stage 1 sales are variously given as ending in 1982 (Dunsfold), 1983 (Silodrome) or 1985 (Wikipedia and the collection's base-model research); New Zealand's deliveries ran to 1986. The Danish Army was still fitting Marshall ambulance bodies and commander's caravans to Series III 109s in the 1980s and 1990s, and the Royal Navy's Portland fire and rescue truck Q877 OBP and the RAF's helicopter-servicing platforms kept 109 hard tops in service well past the end of production.

The Series III's afterlife has been long. Armoured Shorland Mk 3 and Mk 4 patrol cars and SB301 and SB401 personnel carriers stayed in production on Series III and Stage 1 chassis until 1990; Portugal's Campo de Besteiros fire brigade was still running a Series III-cabbed light appliance in 2011; the 'Beer Landy' 109 served as a mobile bar until 2015; a 1973 Shorland became Margaret, The Iron Landy in Las Vegas; and the British Army 88 soft top of The Living Daylights' Gibraltar chase was filmed in 1986–87, after the last one had been built. The type the marque handed on was not so much a vehicle as a layout: the Stage 1's permanent four-wheel drive and locking centre differential, its flush V8 front and the County's cloth seats all went straight into the Ninety, One Ten and Defender.