Americans and Brits have always had a love-hate relationship. Yet for well over a century, fortunately, the predominant mode has been mutual affection, interlaced with a great deal of mutual imitation.
Sometimes imitation doesn't work out so well (e.g., all those pseudo-Cotswold cottages cluttering American cul-de-sacs). Other times it succeeds brilliantly, as in the Brits' reinterpretation of the good old American Jeep in the form of the Land Rover Defender.
From its introduction in 1948 through 2016, the Defender didn’t change much, mainly due to Rover’s lack of cash. This led people to lionize it as a classic, when what it was, really, was archaic. Grown men wept when Land Rover yanked the Defender from the market in 2016 — and some still do even though the Defender was reintroduced in 2020 in a far more modern form.
