Jamie Oliver isn’t exactly a car freak, especially when compared to other celebrity chefs like his longtime rival Gordon Ramsay. Instead, the former Naked Chef enjoys driving tractors and the more practical, family-friendly vehicles. It also means he’s a longtime customer and friend of Jaguar Land Rover.
In a way, bringing the two together to work on a special project must have come naturally. In 2017 Jaguar Land Rover and Jamie Oliver creatively joined forces to create Jamie’s ‘Dream Car’ which also happens to be one of the most impressive and inspired custom vehicles and a hugely successful promotional car. Jamie called it his kitchen on wheels, and rightly so.
And it was the craziest, most insanely creative and best equipped kitchen to ever walk the streets of Britain. Also luxurious. The Land Rover Jamie Oliver was publicly unveiled in October 2017 as a one-off for promotional purposes, as a platform intended to showcase JLR’s work in the Special Vehicle Operations (SVO) division, where JLR customers can customize their new cars.
Photo: Jaguar Land Rover
The vehicle, which had a reported price of £175,000 ($211,645 at the current exchange rate), was featured in a three-part series of specials made available online on Jamie’s YouTube cooking channel, and to this day is considered the “most perfect” way to To combine advertising with the cooking passion of the entire Oliver supporter community. That may sound like an exaggeration, but one look at the vehicle confirms it: it was great.
If you’re going all out to create something extraordinary, you might as well go overboard, the SVO team must have thought when tasked with customizing a car for Jamie. He called for the integration of a rotisserie into the Discovery’s grille and a fold-out table in the trunk, and also floated the idea of turning the wheels into butter churns. And what good is an armrest refrigerator in the car if you don’t also have a toaster? Or a coffee maker?
Both JLR and Jamie talked a lot at the time about how this one-off vehicle was intended to be some sort of manifestation of a family car from the future, when family dinners are no longer a concern. This bit is marketing talk and is very evident in all of the promotional videos, which to a trained eye appear scripted but aren’t offensively bad as a result. That doesn’t change the fact that the car’s redesign and finish was of superb quality and, just as importantly, everything worked perfectly.
At the front, the Discovery featured an extendable 1.5 meter rotisserie for up to three average sized chickens, a turkey, a leg of lamb or even a small piglet. The rotisserie, mounted behind the Land Rover badge, gets its power from the engine, as does the pasta cutter, which uses the same mount. The rotisserie featured a 40 inch flat screen TV with connectivity just in case Jamie’s family didn’t find his cooking entertainment during their outings.
Photo: Jaguar Land Rover
In the engine bay, the SVO team integrated a 4.7-litre slow cooker, because what’s life without one, right? The cabin also held a few surprises, including a toaster next to the fridge, a dedicated jam and chutney compartment hidden in the dash, a portable coffee maker, and a portable USB-charged vacuum cleaner in the passenger footwell. Jam and toast may be breakfast, but nobody likes crumbs.
The real surprise, however, was in the background. Here, SVO built a complete fold-out kitchen, including a two-burner gas stove and sink with running water, as well as a fold-out and pull-out worktop that doubled as a table. In the tailgate, they integrated separate vinegar and olive oil dispensers and converted a couple of car levers for them. A gear shift was turned into a salt and pepper mill, while a custom pestle and mortar were made to resemble a flask.
On each side of the car and accessible through the rear windows was a herb garden and spice rack, while a secret compartment in the trunk held Jamie’s hottest condiments. Another big surprise was the butter makers in three of the bikes as the fourth contained an ice cream maker.
Since no family outing is complete without a BBQ, Jamie’s car had one, too. Crafted from a Discovery’s grille, it unfolded and sat on a folding metal table encased in a modified standard 25-litre (6.6-gallon) jerrycan.
Photo: Jaguar Land Rover
The vehicle featured distinctive LR-JO badging throughout and, at least for the limited online cooking series, a matching license plate. As the two videos available below show, every single one of the features mentioned was fully functional, so Jamie’s excitement at trying them out is understandable, even if his A-list status means he’s probably used to outrageous things.
Promotional vehicles are about showing off. This one also helped JLR show itself, but it did it in a way that pushed the limits in terms of what you can accomplish with your car. Many of today’s vanlifers pride themselves – in a rather annoying way – on showing off what their RVs can do, but let’s get one thing straight: none of them can hold a candle to Jamie’s Discovery kitchen equipment.
We couldn’t find any trace of the vehicle after 2017, but we’ll update this story if and when we hear from JLR about its whereabouts.
