So, the $500,000 (£410,000) Range Rover is upon us - and there's every indication that the brand has plenty of headroom – courtesy of its extensive personalisation offering – to take transaction prices ever higher as it penetrates ever further into the upper echelons of the luxury car market?

Will it work? History would certainly suggest so.

There's a tale from the early days of Asian motor shows, about how one British luxury marque displayed a fabulously opulent one-off limo on its exhibition stand.

One local collector was so smitten he would have had his staff carry it out of the hall on day one were it not for one thing: the price.

The firm had whispered a figure of $900,000, which upset the potential owner: he could never buy such a vehicle unless he could tell friends his new car had a seven-figure price.

Adjustments were hurriedly made - including the embroidery of an old master oil painting into the headlining, which doubled the car's value - and the purchase went through.

Back then, this was a rare story; today, tales of people competing to pay ever higher prices for cars are an emerging phenomenon. The global population of ultra-high-net-worth individuals (estates valued at $30 million-plus) grew by nearly 10% between 2025 and 2026, the biggest rise yet.

Plenty of them will be in the market for new Range Rovers, and most will want the best there is.

But don't run away with the idea that these consumers are pushovers. Most are canny; they know how many decades it takes for a car to acquire authenticity and achieve greatness.

So if Range Rover is about to coin it as never before, its success is directly down to the brilliance of the designers and engineers who started this journey back in the 1960s - and to the inspiration of their successors across every decade since.