The world’s richest drivers are living in a golden age of customization. Collective investments by luxury carmakers ticking into the hundreds of millions have allowed their customers to design their vehicles as though they were tweaking them in the factory as they were being built.
After investing tens of millions of dollars on bespoke paint options, one of those carmakers, Jaguar Land Rover, is now eyeing the luxury of flexibility to get its hands on freshly minted wealthy millennials.
JLR’s luxury pivot
In the last few years, Jaguar Land Rover has been on a mission to nudge itself deeper into the high-net-worth and ultra-net-worth markets after realizing it couldn’t compete on volume with more mass-market premium brands like Mercedes-Benz and BMW.
There have been stutters along the way, not least the tumultuous Jaguar rebrand, which became a victim of online culture wars before a model was even unveiled. Nevertheless, it has underscored the group’s determination to target the next generation of wealthy carbuyers.
That is reflected in the evolution of JLR’s volumes. Five years ago, the average JLR car sold for £42,000 ($53,000). That meant the carmaker had to shift 660,000 models in a year to break even. Since then, the average price of a JLR vehicle has increased to £70,000 ($88,000), with the break-even rate more than halving to 300,000 cars.
Emboldened by its strategic shift, JLR is investing in more avenues to appeal to its wealthy customers’ idiosyncrasies.
In January, JLR announced a £65 million ($81 million) investment across two of its sites to enhance its paint capabilities. In a hat tip to its targeted demographic, the group said this would let prospective customers paint their cars the same color as their private jet or yacht.
There are signs the pivot to luxury is already working. JLR swung to profit in 2024 after years of losses. JLR, though, is under no illusions about the need to sustain that pivot to continue to survive and thrive in an increasingly unforgiving auto market.
The company’s competitors in the luxury field have made their own investments in the lucrative personalization market. Rolls-Royce invested £300 million ($379 million) in its Goodwood manufacturing site to increase its offering of bespoke models. Ferrari, meanwhile, made about a fifth of its revenues last year from customization.
To continue finding new ways to appeal to the luxury market, JLR is outsourcing some of its innovation. That’s where InMotion Ventures Studio comes in. The group essentially operates as JLR’s startup incubator, developing companies that could one day form part of the carmaker’s official product offering.
In the past, InMotion backed a startup called Havn, a luxury ride-hailing service that was eventually sold to Blacklane. The end goal of these startups is ultimately to sell them, spin them out, or merge them into JLR’s core business.
Jasdeep Sawhney, the managing director of InMotion Studios, regards InMotion as a speed boat to JLR’s luxury cruise liner.
“A speedboat can go away and venture into new territories, and then it can come back to the cruise liner and inform the direction it should move in in the longer term,” Sawhney told Fortune.
Two of its latest companies, which he says were built on a spreadsheet, are The Out and Pivotal. Together, the de facto startups are targeting a cornerstone of the luxury market: flexibility.
The Out, a rental service operating in London, is intended as a luxury alternative to companies like ZipCar, which offer cheaper, mass-market cars for on-demand rental via an app.
Sawhney cites one wealthy London-based female client who has spent six figures renting from The Out every weekend for the last two years, surpassing the price of owning a Range Rover outright.
“Every weekend she goes away to the countryside and she just wants that vehicle with her. It gets dropped to her office and it gets picked up from her residence on Sunday. And that's the kind of customer that we are now finding more and more,” he said.
Luxury subscriptions
Perhaps more exciting for the potential of luxury flexibility is Pivotal, a tiered subscription service that allows customers to switch up their JLR models over time and cancel with relative ease.
InMotion took inspiration from the private air travel sector, where the Warren Buffett–owned Net Jets allows flyers flexible private jet travel without the exorbitant costs of owning the plane.
Monthly subscription fees range from £950 ($1,200) per month to £2,150 ($2,700) per month, with the most expensive tier allowing drivers to subscribe to a Range Rover. The subscription requires an initial three-month commitment, after which customers can pause or cancel their subscription with two weeks’ notice.
The average customer of these startups is between 35 and 45, much younger than the 60-year-old average JLR customer. Pivotal customers spend an average of £1,800 per month on their subscriptions.
News of a younger customer base will be music to the carmakers’ ears. In November, amid its tumultuous rebrand, Jaguar boss Rawdon Glover said the average Jaguar customer was “quite old and getting older,” and the carmaker needed to access a new demographic.
Alongside enhanced customization, Sawhney says InMotion recognized the “psychographics” of younger customers, who view flexibility as its own form of personalization.
“We always knew that subscription as a consumption model, from a customer perspective, was always driven by the younger demographics,” said Sawhney.
“Anything flexible is a luxury,” he added. “Post-COVID, we've seen young customers…affluent customers, what they really wanted is that flexibility.”
“If they want to change the vehicle and go from a Range Rover to a Defender, that element of choice is there.”
Pivotal and The Out seem to have hit a sweet spot for new product launches, namely capturing a new demographic without cannibalizing an existing audience. The groups are also on a firm financial footing—Sawhney says he always puts pressure on InMotion’s ventures to be profitable.
In that vein, InMotion isn’t resting on its laurels.
Sawhney hopes Pivotal can expand to countries outside the U.K., where JLR customers spend a lot of their time, for example in the United Arab Emirates.
Sawhney summarized: “It's almost like virtually taking your car with you when you travel.”
