The record
The Land Rover Series II was announced in April 1958, ten years after the original Land Rover's debut at the April 1948 Amsterdam Motor Show, and the Rover Company timed the launch as a tenth-anniversary renewal of its all-conquering utility 4x4. It replaced the Series I, whose production overlapped briefly, and carried over the same two wheelbase lengths - 88 inches for the short model and 109 inches for the long one - both of which ran until the Series IIA succeeded them in late 1961.
The Series II was the first Land Rover to pass through Rover's styling department. David Bache, who had joined Rover in 1954 as the company's first stylist, gave the vehicle its curved 'barrel side' waistline: the body sat five inches wider than before to cover the widened axle tracks, and the barrelled 'hip' hid the extra width while softening the Series I's slab-sided utilitarian look. Bache also redesigned the truck cab, introducing the curved side windows and rounded roof that, like the barrel sides themselves, remained on Solihull's utility Land Rovers all the way to the final Defender of 2016.
Mechanically the headline change was the new 2.25-litre overhead-valve petrol engine of around 72 bhp, the unit that went on to power Series Land Rovers into the 1980s and earned a worldwide reputation for longevity. Stocks of the old engine were used up first: the first 1,500 or so 88-inch Series IIs retained the 52 bhp 2.0-litre petrol engine from the Series I, while the 51 bhp 2.0-litre diesel introduced in 1957 continued as the diesel option throughout Series II production. The 109-inch model offered the 2.25 petrol and the 2.0 diesel from the start.
Both wheelbases were sold in the full spread of utility bodies - canvas-tilt soft top, hard top, and truck-cab pickup - plus station wagons: a seven-seater on the 88-inch chassis and, from 1958, a new twelve-seat wagon on the 109, its high seat count qualifying it as a bus for British tax purposes. Roughly 110,000 Series IIs of all types were built before the Series IIA took over in September 1961, though its short production life makes the Series II proper the rarer of the two today.
The Series IIA (1961-1971) brought the 2.25-litre diesel and a decade of detail changes while looking almost identical; this registry treats IIA-based vehicles as a separate model line, so the Series II records here cover only the 1958-1961 'Series II proper'.
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