Gary Pusey

T he Enthusiast

If, like me, you’re still digesting the fact that the impressive Defender Works V8 will set you back £150k then you’re probably gasping at the idea of the quarter of a million pound Range Rover. That’s pretty much what the new SV Coupé will set you back, and that’s before you’ve added your own bespoke ‘personalisation’ options from the 100 exterior colours and vast range of trim options available to you.

JLR’S Gerry Mcgovern describes it as “a celebration of the Range Rover bloodline, with a dramatic two- door silhouette, beautifully realised and superbly engineered” and “the most distinguished, luxurious and exclusive Range Rover ever built”.

It does make me wonder how far this race-to-the-top can go, what with Bentley’s new special edition Bentayga Field Sports model, which is so expensive that Bentley won’t actually publish the list price. It’s probably in that ‘if you have to ask, you can’t afford it’ category of things in life, although I have to say that even if I could afford it I most certainly wouldn’t want it! The Field Sports follows hot on the heels of the Bentayga Fly Fishing special edition (I kid you not) which could apparently be yours for around £240,000, or the Falconry special edition ( yes, that’s real as well) which allows you to transport and fly your hawks in comfort.

I can’t help wondering how many of these faintly barmy Bentleys will be ordered and built, but JLR has said its Range Rover Coupé SV will be limited to 999 vehicles worldwide. There’s clearly a lot of work involved in rolling a standard four- door Range Rover off the production line and taking an angle grinder to it to create a two- door, and then installing a bespoke interior. But the general approach actually isn’t new.

Some of you will remember a previous holder of ‘the most expensive Range Rover ever made’ title which was the limited edition P38A Linley model. A fully-finished 4.6 HSE would come off the production line and be delivered to Special Vehicles who then dismantled it, repainted it (12 coats of Java Black Micatallic, applied by hand) and fitted the bespoke interior with piano black wood and special leather. A maximum of ten vehicles was promised in the press release but in the event only six were made, and one was allegedly nicked off the forecourt of the dealer that ordered it, never to be seen again. A Linley would have cost you around £100,000 in 2000, which according to the Bank of England equals around £160,000 in today’s money.

But times have obviously changed and the true cost of your SV Coupé today is probably going to be at least half as much again as your new Linley would have cost you, and probably more by the time you’ve sorted out your preferences from the options list.

The margins on every car manufacturer’s top-of-the-range models are always higher than the lesser models. When the firstgeneration Range Rover Sport was being designed there was a debate about whether it should be launched as a Range Rover, and whether there was space for two models in the Range Rover line-up. Of course, history shows that there was room for a ‘baby’ Range Rover and the Sport became a best-seller. Since then, two more models have been added to the Range Rover family and all have sold well with the new kid on the Range Rover block, the Velar, recently being voted the world’s most beautifully- designed car, winning the 2018 World Car Design of the Year title.

Back in the early-noughties, when there was only one Range Rover – the full-fat version – and the company was considering how to position the new L320 in the marketplace, I’ve heard that the clincher was that selling the vehicle as the Range Rover would generate an additional 15 per cent profit on every car sold, such was the cachet attached to the Range Rover brand. I’m sure the same holds true today with an Evoque, for example, being sold for a highermargin retail price as a Range Rover than if it had been called a Discovery, or a Land Rover. And I’m guessing that it’s probably the case that a new Discovery Sport can be sold for a higher price as a Discovery than if it were called a Freelander 3.

None of which particularly bothers me and if JLR can continue to make decent profits from selling large numbers of vehicles that people want to own, and are prepared to pay for, then I am more than delighted. But I always assumed that the high margins on the top-of-the-range vehicles meant that a manufacturer could afford to create cheaper, entry-level models that might not generate the same profits, but are crucial to the creation of an end-to-end range and useful in allowing buyers to see how they might aspire to upgrade, while enjoying the satisfaction of owning something that shares the brand with the top-end vehicles that cost a mint.

So the real questions for me are these. What will the everincreasing success of JLR in terms of top-end, high-margin vehicles actually mean when it comes to the new Defender, and will the company launch it as an entry-level vehicle with an affordable price? And what would affordable be in terms of what we’d be prepared to pay for it? Depending on what it looks like, of course, and what it can do.

Gary Pusey is co-author of Range Rover The First Fifty, trustee of The Dunsfold Collection and a lifelong Land Rover enthusiast. What this man doesn’t know, isn’t worth knowing!

“The question is will JLR launch the Defender as an entrylevel vehicle with an affordable price tag?”