OK this one is throwing me for a loop. Land Rover, the SUV company, apparently wants to trademark a new brand name: “Road Rover.” If your reaction is “what,” that is also my reaction.
If I am not mistaken, “roads” tend to go on the “land.” And as such, Land Rover should generally cover all things on the land, including, uh, “roads.” And even if there was a distinction, there’s already “Rover,” a not-so-storied brand name already owned by Land Rover’s parent company, Tata Motors.
So if there was a car made by LAND Rover that only went on the ROADS, it would be fine, it would seem, to just call it a REGULAR Rover. Or, you know, a Rover.
But no. Road Rover it is, according to Autocar:
Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has applied for the trademark to the Road Rover name – a year after Autocar was told that the branding was merely an internal codename for a new model line.
[...]
It will be a premium electric model aimed primarily at markets such as the US and China.
The first Road Rover is understood to be a Mercedes-Benz S-Class rival in terms of outright luxury and interior craftsmanship but with some all-terrain capability. The car will also be tuned for impressive on-road dynamic performance, taking advantage of the potential delivered by electric motors.
Correct me if I’m wrong, and who knows, maybe I am! But I seem to remember Land Rover already making a rival to the S-Class, known as the Jaguar XJ. And if it were to be an S-Class rival in terms of luxury and interior craftsmanship, but also with some all-terrain capability, it would be a Range Rover.
But maybe I’m just not on the Galaxy Brain level of people who name cars these days.
Anyway, Autocar goes on to note that “Road Rover” is actually a name historic to Land Rover, and that it was the name of a 1960s two-door SUV concept that later morphed into the original Range Rover, and there was recently a small batch two-door Range Rovers sent into production, so there is vaguely some precedent here.
Precedent aside, I will still be a stubborn ox and proclaim “Road Rover” to be a strange name for a car.
I will inevitably be proven wrong when you lot buy a billion of the things.