As the last Land Rover Defender rolls off the production line (sob), we celebrate our favourite off-road icons.

It should really be the hybrid, or the EV (that’s “electric vehicle” – think BMW’s i series). Or maybe something on four wheels that typifies our ultra-connected world. But the truth is that our desires are often irrational, especially when it comes to cars, and the trend that most exemplifies mobility in 2016 is the sports utility vehicle, or SUV. They’re big, heavy, and not very efficient, but everyone wants one. Counter-intuitive and wildly over-engineered for the majority of people who end up driving them, the SUV is nevertheless king of the road.

Their origins, however, are honest, and lie in engineering and design at its most functional. How else do you drive up a mountain, or keep the peace in a war zone? As the original Land Rover finally bows out after 68 years of continuous production, we thought we would pay tribute to it and seven other rock-solid, old-school SUVs.

The people who really know about these things – farmers, builders, jihadis, and Nato peacekeepers – will tell you that nothing on four wheels is tougher than a Toyota Land Cruiser. Remember the episode of _Top Gear _when the Toyota Hilux pick-up survived the tower block demolition? Well, the Land Cruiser is its bigger brother, blessed with the same Highlander-style immortality.

The current iteration, the J200, is the latest in a blood-line that stretches all the way back to 1941, when the Imperial Japanese Army ripped off the design of the US Jeep. Now gussied-up and available with all sorts of refinements – airbags and air con – its crude but effective ladder frame chassis joins the dots all the way back to its origins, and it’ll still reach places largely untouched by mankind. The 1960s J40 – called Bandeirante in Brazil and Macho in Venezuela – is so anti-fashion it’s now highly fashionable, but the bigger, comfier 1980s J60 Land Cruiser is the left-field choice. For the field on the left and the right…

Like its Japanese oppo, the Toyota Land Cruiser, the Nissan Patrol is a car seemingly built from girders. The good officers of the WHO and UN can’t be wrong, and while the Patrol has all the aesthetic appeal of a cement block, it is – often literally – bulletproof. As with the Land Cruiser, the early 1950s Patrol took a while to outgrow its Jeep facsimile origins, but by 1980, the third generation 160 series had acquired a formidably robust reputation. Venture off the beaten track anywhere in the world, and it’s odds-on you’ll find yourself in or behind one of these brilliant vehicles. Later iterations began to get ideas above their station, but remain beloved in the UAE.

What’s the difference between a Lada and a golf ball? You can drive a golf ball 200 metres… Poor old Lada: the butt of a thousand lame gags. The Niva off-roader is perhaps the one vehicle in the Lada stable to which such jokes did not apply. Like the Fiat Panda 4x4, it’s popular in ski resorts and remote rural areas because it’s built like a brick outhouse while being unusually light – which means it can scamper up and down slopes and ravines like a mountain goat. Nor would a brush with a rock face change its bodywork much: the only curve on a Niva is on its wheels. Extras? There’s an attachment for a snowplough.

The Merc is another vehicle whose basic fitness for purpose helps it laugh in the face of time’s relentless onslaught. Mercedes’ Austrian partner Steyr-Daimler-Puch originally conceived the G-Wagen for the German military. That was in the early 1970s, yet the thing has soldiered on and is currently more popular than ever 37 years after production began – and enjoying a lucrative after-life principally in absurdly potent AMG form. The G65 has a twin-turbo V12, but even that has been recently upstaged by a ludicrous 6x6 version, complete with five differential locks, half a metre of ground clearance and hyper-real Tonka toy visuals. A car as spectacularly brilliant as it is stupid.

This really is ground zero. Created by Willys-Overland in 1941 to answer a request from the US army for a general purpose (GP – hence the name) recon vehicle, the Jeep is one of the few cars around for which the word “icon” can be permitted. The first civilian version appeared in 1944, and has morphed over the 72 years since into all sorts of forms. The best is the Rubicon, named in honour of one of the world’s toughest off-road trails near Lake Tahoe, California, and equipped with a “Rock-Trac” two-speed transfer case, ultra low-range gear ratios, and electric locking differentials at the front and back. It’s almost unstoppable, even across seemingly impossible terrain.

Forget the current princely model, the earliest Range Rover had an interior you could hose down, and a gearlever about a foot long. But somehow its engineers, Messrs Spen King and Gordon Bashford, and its designer, Mr David Bache, conjured up a character and ability that was and remains unique. It used a 3.5-litre V8 engine derived from an old Buick unit, but its unruffled smoothness suited the original Range Rover’s personality. Coil spring suspension and disc brakes gave it an on-road poise that no contemporary 4x4 could touch, and its design cues included a “floating roof” and a “castellated clamshell” bonnet that are still recognisable features today.

In the early 1980s, the author Mr Peter York famously characterised the Range Rover as the archetypal Sloane’s car – referring to its burgeoning popularity in the well-heeled west London area of Sloane Square – and the arrival of the posh Vogue version shortly thereafter cemented this upwardly mobile status. But the earliest cars are now highly sought after, and a good one costs almost as much as a brand new model. You won’t be hosing that out.

Mr Don Frey was Ford’s top 1960s product man, and the brains not only behind the company’s glorious entry into endurance racing with the GT40, but also the original Mustang. That’s enough to be going on with. Yet he also devised the Bronco, Ford’s Jeep rival, and a car of such rugged visual and engineering simplicity that Apple’s design genius Sir Jonathan Ive would surely approve. Later versions lost the charm, and the Bronco was discontinued after 30 years in production back in 1996. But with a new manufacturing deal under way in the US, the word on the street is that an all-new Bronco should be on sale by 2020. (If you can’t find a decent early car, Californian resto-modders Icon will effectively build you one.)

The daddy, or possibly great-granddaddy. One of the car world’s greatest survivors, the Defender has finally ceased production. Although it looks broadly the same as the basic shape sketched in the sand in Anglesey by Rover engineer Mr Maurice Wilks in 1947, the original Land Rover has assumed a bewildering array of forms across the two million units that have been sold. Called Defender since 1983, the most recent update gave it a modern 2.2-litre diesel engine, but its barn door aerodynamics and chunky construction sees it hit a top speed brick wall at 90mph. Such things are irrelevant: an estimated 1.5 million Landies are still rolling, three run-out limited-edition versions sold out immediately, and the two-millionth car off the production line made a thumping £400k at a Bonhams auction last December. A genuine hero car.