I'd like to agree, but the second multi millionaire you knew lived in one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in London, and the first multi millionaire you dont know where he lived but has an expensive car and is likely the same.
I've always lived in cheap arsed neighbourhoods, my recent place is above average and it makes a lot of things easier - even if I dont really enjoy the boring corporate neighbours.
Mmm...yes it was an expensive car brand, but it is a common car in Africa because it's just so reliable, very rugged and also easy to repair. And it's not that expensive.
I don't really get that comparison. The current day Land Rover / Range Rovers are very different from "very rugged and easy to repair" ones of the past as they are basically SUVs now.
This might have been true for the Defender but not any more.
Land Rovers became a status signal because people with remote country homes that they kinda actually did need an off-road-capable car to reliably get to and from, would also drive them in the city sometimes, or in resort towns, or other visible places. People who had no actual use for them started imitating them and buying Land Rovers.
Then people a notch down from even that level of cluefulness caught on. Land Rover started making cars to cater to that market, which only cared about Land Rover because "it's a rich-people brand" but had no idea how they'd gotten that way, and just wanted a suburban SUV with Land Rover branding. I assume Land Rovers, at least newer ones, are now considered a bit embarrassing for at least the second group (the first wave of imitators).
Expensive yes. Reliable, dunno. I have an Audi, also a Volkswagen group car. It's fun, sporty, feels "expensive" but it has the worst reliability of all the cars I've owned, on par with Fiat. I use to joke that the four circles represent the amount spent on maintenance and repairs.
The association with the "cheap" brand is just a flimsy justification to be used by a bunch of Americans who drive 4Runners and Pilots (mostly, there's probably the odd Explorer in there) and have a desire to feel superior over people who "flaunt" their wealth or use it "irresponsibly".
All these vehicles cost in the same ballpark (or at least have large overlapping ranges) so roughly all the same people have access to them. It's not about status. It's about tribe signaling.
Sorry, I didn't give enough shits to realize we were comparing to the Range Rover and not Landrover SUVs generally. In that case the 4Runner was the wrong comparison point since the Range Rover more directly competes with the LX600 (86k MSRP). I'm not going to dig through the options lists to figure out where the discrepancy is.
My point still stands. Expensive Toyota SUV buying people like to shit on expensive European SUV buying people not because they are of substantially different means but because they are of substantially different tribes.
I've always lived in cheap arsed neighbourhoods, my recent place is above average and it makes a lot of things easier - even if I dont really enjoy the boring corporate neighbours.