Land Rover’s Latest Helped Raise $800k – And It Doesn’t Even Have Wheels

Faced with increasingly luxurious competition, Land Rover keeps making more and more expensive models.

But even the top Range Rover SVAutobiography costs “only” $208k. Yet this latest piece of metal to come from the British automaker helped raise over $800,000. And it’s not even a car or a truck, or a motor vehicle of any kind. It’s a sculpture of a rhinoceros.

The installation piece, as you may recall, was created by Land Rover’s design boss Gerry McGovern for the Tusk Rhino Trail – a charitable organization dedicated to saving the endangered African rhinoceros. It’s all chromed with a red horn to make Rudolf blush, and at four feet long, it’s considerably smaller than even a three-door Evoque – or a Mini hatchback, for that matter.

Land Rover’s rhino was towed into London’s Trafalgar Square behind a Discovery, and put on display there for all to enjoy (and to raise awareness to the animal’s plight). But now that the event is over, it’s been auctioned off.

Christie’s held the sale on the eve of the Illegal Wildlife Trade conference. And though neither the auctioneer, the charity, nor the automaker revealed individual hammer prices, the event raised some £624,000 – or about $823k at current exchange rates. That’s more than any other fundraising event in the charity’s history, and works out to an approximate average of $40k (or about the price of a new Discovery Sport) for each of the 21 such rhino sculptures sold at the event. And we’d bet that McGovern’s probably sold for more than most (if not all) of the others.

“We are delighted to have helped Tusk raise over £600,000 at auction, all of which will go to supporting their vital work in wildlife conservation,” said JLR’s corporate social responsibility director Chris Thorp. “In our long-standing partnership we are continuing to enable Tusk to reach remote territories using Land Rover’s all-terrain capability, making it the perfect fit for conservation work all around the world.”