There was a moment at the auction of the
two millionth Land Rover Defender
when it looked as if bidding had stalled at £160,000. Still a seriously impressive amount for what was, barring some unique bits of trim and its numerical place in the build order, just another Defender. But the room at Bonhams was filled with a sense of mild disappointment, the feeling that this clearly wasn't a ludicrous enough number to justify the hype.
400 grand. For a Defender.
Because although not the last ever Defender - production doesn't stop until January - the 2,000,000th had been given the full treatment, from some unique design features to the fact that Land Rover had pretty much called every name in its celebrity black book to help assemble the thing. Bear Grylls put on one of the wheels, according to the auction catalogue, while JLR's CEO Ralf Speth screwed on the chassis plate.
But the pause only lasted a moment. One of the Bonhams employees whispering to telephone bidders at the corner of the room nodded a new bid, the auctioneer stopped fiddling with his gavel, and things started to go again. The price got past 200 grand within seconds - a senior Land Rover manager later admitted their ambition had been "starts with a two" - but then carried on in fine style into the threes, bids rising in 20 grand increments to £320,000, then more slowly - and £10,000 at a time - to the £400,000 where the gavel finally fell. It was genuinely exciting stuff, and there was also the secondhand warm glow of knowing that - as Smashey and Nicey would say - it was all for charidee mate with the proceeds split between the Red Cross and the Born Free Foundation.
The winning bidder was an unnamed Qatari who has the distinction of having almost certainly paid more for a Land Rover than anybody else ever; even ticking every box on a Range Rover SV Autobiography wouldn't take you half way there. They have also bought a right-hand drive car that - if Google is to be believed - they're going to struggle to register in their home country, although we suspect that anybody who can splash out £400K on a Defender probably isn't going to have too many issues getting their way with Qatar's vehicle registration authority. It's also likely that the Defender will spend its life in hermetically sealed storage, although that would be a shame. Here's hoping it actually gets driven.
here
Look for (slightly more realistically priced) Land Rover Defenders in the PH classifieds here.