Our Cars: Range Rover P550e Autobiography

Good heavens, it’s enormous. I went on the launch of this car and don’t remember it being this large. Then again, parked next to so many other of its kin, it wasn’t. Next to the family Golf, however…

The Range Rover is such a clever car, not just because it’s full of widgets – which it is – or will go places no other luxury car could imagine – which it will – but because it is the car that has towed an entire car company to levels of turnover and profit unimaginable without it. For every time a Range Rover goes upmarket, that creates space below for all the other little Range Rovers to step up into.

And upmarket it has gone: here is one costing a whisker less than £150,000 wearing its Autobiography duds with a small number of options, but put your mind to it on the configurator and it’s not hard to spend £200,000 on a new Range Rover. Yet as recently as 2014, Land Rover had never tried to sell one for £100,000. Today you can’t buy a new one for less than that. It sells in huge numbers at massive margins. It is the gift that keeps on giving.