New Range Rover Fifty Edition celebrates 50 YEARS of Range Rover goodness

This week the Range Rover is 50 years old, and to celebrate Land Rover announces the Range Rover Fifty Edition to mark the occasion. Just 1,970 will be built.

It’s rather hard to call a car that costs £100k classless, but that’s what the Range Rover is. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a footballer or Royalty, entrepreneur or ‘Celeb’, the Range Rover is the car of choice for those with pockets deep enough.

Yes, there are pretenders to the Range Rover’s crown, and some, like the Bentley Bentayga, come from even more storied brands than Land Rover and, arguably, offer more. But the Range Rover keeps on selling at a rate of about 50,000 a year, ten times the Bentayga’s sales numbers.

But the Range Rover’s 50,000 a year sales are just part of the story, as the original Range Rover has spawned variants too, with the Range Rover Sport, Range Rover Evoque and Range Rover Velar adding another 200,000 or so sales a year to the Range Rover’s tally.

But it was the original Range Rover which launched in 1970 – fifty years ago this week – that laid the foundation for Land Rover’s success with Range Rover models, and to celebrate Land Rover is building a limited run of top-end Range Rovers to celebrate – the Range Rover Fifty Edition.

The Range Rover Fifty Edition is limited to just 1,970 units (to mark the year of its arrival – 1970) and be based on the range-topping Autobiography trim, which starts at £103,000 and heads up to £180,000. So expect the Range Rover Fifty Edition to be even more expensive.

Land Rover hasn’t revealed the full spec for the Fifty Edition Range Rovers yet, but we know they come with exterior trim in a new Auric Atlas black with a choice of two 22″ alloy wheel designs and a ‘Fifty’ script on the headrests, dashboard and treadplates, and on a build number plaque in the cabin.

Colour choices for the Fifty Edition will be Aruba, Carpathian Grey, Rosello Red and Santorini Black, but there will also be, for a limited number, a choice of original 1970 colours – Tuscan Blue, Bahama Gold and Davos White.