Roy Lunn

[1] He had forty-one years in the design development and production of vehicles and most notably served as the head of engineering at American Motors Corporation (AMC) from 1971 to 1987.

In 1953, Lunn joined Ford Motor Company in England and was assigned the task of starting a new Research Center in Birmingham.

He participated in the development of a 170,000-pound (77,111 kg) gross vehicle weight rating highway truck, as well as the Cardinal, Ford's first front-wheel drive automobile that became the 15-M Taunus.

Lunn was charged to build the "ultimate Mustang" and worked with Kar Kraft, the Brighton, Michigan, specialty shop that built many of Ford's racing cars at the time, to produce the Boss 429.

[7] Lunn joined American Motors in 1971 as the director of engineering for Jeep, which had recently been purchased by AMC from Kaiser.

Because AMC lacked the resources to conduct the lengthy durability tests before the late 1983 introduction of the Cherokee XJ, Lunn headed the first American entry to drive the Paris-Dakar rally.

[2] The objective of his team was "not to compete but simply to run the brutal desert course" with two new Cherokees and monitor how they would survive the punishing 6,200 mi (9,978 km) racecourse.

[2] Lunn's design "became the template for the modern SUV and continues to be copied by virtually all major global automakers.

The High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle military Jeep (Hummer) was going into production and Lunn was charged with overseeing the corrective actions to achieve acceptance by the U.S. Army.