Half A Million Vehicles. 60 Years. Not Bad!

Well what do you know? A Range Rover Sport sold in Southern California makes it half a million vehicles sold in the U.S. Of course, that’s not including, um, well…

Land Rover North America announced this weekend during its annual Retailer Breakfast Meeting at the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) convention in New Orleans, that a Range Rover Sport Supercharged became the company's 500,000th vehicle sold in the United States.

Of course this is only since 1987 and ignores 16,000 or so Series trucks that are still kicking around the U.S. Not to mention the gray market before 1987, which saw a widely arguable number of early Range Rovers that don’t exactly figure into the numbers here (not that we, you know, know).

For the record, the Range Rover Sport was sold by Land Rover Cerritos, a retailer in Southern California.

"Reaching this milestone demonstrates the strength of the Land Rover brand and is a result of a dedicated and passionate retailer network," said Chris Marchand, Executive Vice President, Marketing and Sales, Land Rover North America. "The Land Rover model line-up has undergone a complete revitalization and reaching this achievement shows the growth we have experienced over the past four years. It took us ten years to sell the first 100,000 vehicles and we have sold the last 100,000 since July of 2006."

Again, for the record, Land Rover North America began retailing vehicles – officially - on March 16, 1987, importing its first Range Rover into the United States. This is widely credited with single-handedly creating the luxury sports utility vehicle segment (leave it to the British!). The company reached its first major milestone of 100,000 vehicles sold by September 1997 and 250,000 vehicles by December 2002.

And, once again, for the record, Atlantic British Ltd. was established in 1970, the year the first Range Rover was born in the U.K. What can we say? We saw a trend happening.

As you know, Land Rover is currently celebrating its 60th anniversary and is making big noise globally with stints and stunts from Europe to Dubai to… well, you know. This is Land Rover, after all. And it doesn’t show signs of slowing down – even given the downturns in the global auto marketplace – with industry-leading green initiatives (see “JLR Unveils New Technical Academy”) and outrageous new models like the forthcoming, breakthrough LRX (see “LRX Awarded N. American Concept Of The Year”).

Like I said… this is Land Rover, after all.