The following piece was submitted to Autocar by long-time reader Oliver Jerome. Let us know whether you agree or disagree with him in the comments below

Never has a colour defined a brand more than green has for Land Rover. As we celebrate 70 years of Land Rover, the recent passing from the standard colourway of Aintree Green — the final descendant of noble ancestors Deep Bronze, Keswick, Belize, Tonga, Coniston, Lincoln, Epsom and Galway — signifies the end of an era.

It is with a heavy heart that I inform you of the great sadness that has befallen the Land Rover online vehicle configurator. We have already accepted that the glorious days of wandering through the meadow of 27 Defender variants were long gone; our hearts can no longer flutter at the film-star handsome patrician L322 Range Rover and the square-jawed Tardistank Land Rover Discovery 4 has been ushered from this mortal stage.

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But sudden was the dark veil of grief that cloaked the user upon the realisation that Land Rover no longer offers Aintree Green as a standard colour option for its range of vehicles.

Following Jaguar Land Rover’s most recent act of senicide, when it finally saw off the Defender, we were subjected to a full autopsy of the old beast. Perhaps partly in appeasement of its own guilt, Land Rover implored us with stories about Maurice Wilkes, about Anglesey and Red Wharf Bay, about that shape in the sand, fois-gras-goosing us with heritage until our ears bled and our eyes stung with Instagram spam of helicopter montages.

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And the green paint? How many words on that green, leftover army surplus green paint, any colour you liked as long as it was green? HUE166 was green, the final Defender was green, the fabric of the brand was green, it is the reason the Land Rover oval is now green. 

Green was to Land Rover as red was to Ferrari, blue to Bugatti, orange to McLaren. Wilkes’s original hand-painted (and, in my mind, matt) green finish sired more than a dozen glorious variants — colours that defined their era and their maker. Was there ever a hue more glorious than Keswick, the tone that HUE166 himself wears so proudly? 

And so it is that we mourn for Aintree Green. Sadly not a natural death — eviscerated from the configurator because JLR simply didn’t feel the demand was there. We enter a post-green age, a sloe-black, slow black, triple black, crystal-meth black-tinted black-packed world, as if the entire vehicle had been hot-dipped in crude oil.