Land Rover has placed a bet that the buyers of its cars, and a new generation of outdoor enthusiasts and extreme sports fans, will want to own the equivalent of a four-wheel-drive smartphone.
The company has developed a bespoke handset with Bullitt Group, a Reading-based phone maker, that will hit the market next year.
Details of the handset will be kept under wraps until the launch but Bullitt, which has developed rugged phones for JCB and the world’s first thermal imaging phone with Flir, said that it would appeal to consumers with an active lifestyle.
Charlie Henderson, head of Bullitt’s lifestyle and peripherals division, said that the difficulty in designing a handset for a “Land Rover” customer was complicated by the different styles of vehicle made by the company, with some of its cars popular with the “Knightsbridge elite” and others with farmers — people with different communications needs. It was also keen not to limit itself to existing Land Rover buyers, as that would only represent about half a million sales a year, a small number in the global mobile phone sector.
Land Rover, which is owned by Tata Motors, of India, hopes that the new phone will have appeal beyond those people that want to buy one of its cars. “Someone who drives a Honda Civic or Toyota Land Cruiser may never have thought they would have a Land Rover in the drive but they would do the three peak challenge,” Mr Henderson said.
Advertisement
The price of the new handset won’t be revealed until the launch, although it will be positioned as a mid-to-high-end device going up against models such as the Samsung Galaxy S6.
It is not the first time that car companies have moved into the mobile phone market, with makers including Ferrari and Aston Martin releasing limited edition, and limited function, phones with little effect. Land Rover has launched phones in the past with handsets that claimed to be waterproof and which came in “rusty” colours.
Mr Henderson said that those models were mostly for “fanboys” and were little more than basic feature phones with little input from the car companies apart from the logo on the front. “This is not a badge-slapping exercise,” he said of the new Land Rover phone, adding that designers and top executives in Gaydon, Warwickshire, where the car company is based, had thrown their weight behind the phone.
The smartphone market in Britain has boiled down to Apple and a small number of Android players, mostly Samsung, but some brands hope that they can make a mark by appealing to consumers tired of the typical range of handsets. “It’s a pub feedback test. You put your phone out in front of you to make a statement,” Mr Henderson said.