Car Sight

The Land Rover Freelander is a compact crossover SUV or "lifestyle 4WD"[1] made by the British company Land Rover; a subsidiary of Tata Motors. The current generation is sold as the LR2 in North America, as opposed to Freelander 2 in Europe. It is built on a unibody structure unlike traditional SUVs which use the more rugged body-on-frame structure

The Freelander, wholly designed with Land Rover owned by the Rover Group, was born after market research in the late 1980s suggested that a market for compact off-roaders was likely to develop. In the early 1990s Rover Group had a very restricted product development budget and looked for a partner to develop the Freelander project, which was codenamed CB40 (after Canley Building 40, where the concept was initially developed). Rover's then-partner Honda declined and chose to develop its own CR-V model, which launched in 1997.

Rover decided to go it alone with the CB40, which meant using parts from a limited parts bin, as it had done with the MGF roadster. BMW took over Rover Group in 1994, and supported the project whole-heartedly - finally CB40 had the capital it needed to proceed. The car was launched in late 1997. It became Europe's best-selling four-wheel drive model until 2002.[3][citation needed] The last Freelanders in North America were sold as 2005 models.