Displaying British Reserve, but Ready to Play in Dirt Jaguar Land Rover OPENING SALVO Displayed in just 32 showrooms, the 1987 Range Rover made its United States debut with a base price of $30,825 - almost $63,000 in 2012 dollars. DID America really need - or want - a luxury sport utility? That was the question confronting Tony Gilroy, managing director of Land Rover, as the company began exploring ways to bring its Range Rover brand to the United States in the mid-1980s. The question was far from casual. Land Rover, part of what had been the British Leyland conglomerate, was a ward of the British government at the time, and Mr. Gilroy's mandate was to either make the company float or pull the plug. Land Rover had left the United States in 1975, unable to rationalize the escalating costs of complying with federal emissions and safety regulations. But looking at the possible avenues to profitability just a few years later, Mr. Gilroy concluded that the United States was the key to the company's survival. Mr. Gilroy may have been influenced by the sales success of the 1984 Jeep Cherokee, arguably the vehicle that touched off the boom in sport utility vehicles. The Cherokee countered the prevailing notion that S.U.V."s had to be cumbersome truck-based machines ill-suited to urban and suburban America. But the Cherokee was distinctly middle class, and the opportunity Mr. Gilroy saw, amplified by market research, was a niche at the top of the new S.U.V. market. A niche, moreover, that did not yet exist - aspirational, affluent, with upper-crust British cachet, one later described as "old armchair British." Charlie Hughes, who coined that description, was a regional marketing manager for Volkswagen in 1985 when he was approached by a corporate recruiter. He became the chief executive of Range Rover North America on Jan. 1, 1986. Establishing an automotive nameplate in a new country is a monumental task, and the team that sat down to tackle the job was extremely lean - just Mr. Hughes and nine others, including Roger Ball, a highly regarded marketing expert imported from Land Rover, and Bill Baker, a public relations executive who became an industry legend for staging new-model introductions that were extraordinary adventures for the journalists attending. They were starting with just 32 dealers nationwide, but their initial product - an Americanized Range Rover - already had 17 years of development behind it, during which it had become a symbol of class and good taste as well as extraordinary off-road prowess and on-road comfort. Pundits referred to the vehicles as Chelsea tractors, a poke at their proliferation in the fashionable district of London, and to their owners as Sloan rangers, for that city's exclusive residential area. Mr. Hughes recognized the appeal of exclusivity, and when it was time to establish a base price, in March 1987, he insisted it should be over $30,000. That was some $5,000 more than Jeep's big Grand Wagoneer, which lacked the Range Rover's panache. "The clinics all said if you charged more than $25,000 you'd never sell any," Mr. Hughes said in a telephone interview, describing the research with potential buyers. We sold 2,500 that first year and had about 1,000 back orders. Exclusivity and image helped Range Rover overcome persistent quality problems in the early days and carried the company to a prestige position it still enjoys, despite the arrival of technically advanced competitors. Mr. Baker, who retired from the company in 2003, went to great lengths to demonstrate the vehicles" off-road capabilities, but he well understood that the blue-blood image was also vital to the brand's appeal. "You didn't need to have a Range Rover to have a good 4-wheel drive vehicle any more than you needed to have a Rolex to tell time," he said in a telephone interview. That wisdom still holds. On this page are some memorable branches on the company's family tree.