For the love of the Rover

“Land Rovers and Range Rovers just make sense to me”

Something clicked when Taylor Congleton first started taking apart vintage Land Rovers - the design, intention, history and tradition captured in each of the vehicles touched off a fervor inside of him. Without any traditional mechanical training, Taylor spent hours upon hours taking apart and rebuilding vintage Rovers, learning their language and their quirks.

That passion has turned into his career, as Congleton Service is widely recognized as one of the premier restorers of vintage Land Rovers and Range Rovers anywhere in the world - and it all happens in Colchester, Vermont.

Taylor joined our own Dan Egan on this episode of the Designed by Tradition podcast to talk about his undying passion for Land Rover, and how he turned that passion into his career.

Taylor has long been a big friend of Alps & Meters, and we’ve been fortunate enough to share in his passion, test driving a few vehicles that have rolled out of his shop over the years.

Loading up a restored Range Rover Classic on the way to the mountain

“Modern technologies and unlimited time allow us to build trucks that far exceed their quality when new. Building this way is slow, painful, expensive and frustrating. There are no shortcuts, no easy ways to save time, and no workarounds. A Congleton Certified Classic is made to last 50-years before needing another rebuild. Well cared for, we expect them to last indefinitely.”

“At Congleton we believe in originality and evolutionary improvement. While those two things are seemingly in conflict with each other, they’ve kept us firmly on the course we intended. We improve these trucks for performance, reliability, safety and comfort, but we won’t insult the men who designed them and built them by hand many years ago.

We think the boys in Solihull would have figured out how to rust-proof the trucks, so we do it. We don’t think they’d bolt in Chevrolet/Corvette LS crate engines, so we don’t do that. We do hand-build Rover V8s that are more reliable than the originals and much more powerful, because we think they would have continued improving the engine as they’d been doing for decades. There’s a place for highly-modified vehicles and we’ve owned more than our share… it’s just not what we do here.”

A vintage Land Rover Series III

A restored Defender 110 on the shores of Lake Champlain