Automotive

Fifteen marques file here, from seven countries, and their founding years run 1904 to 2015 — the most recent founding anywhere in this register belongs to this room. An automobile is the only object in the book that has to pass a crash test, which means every romantic claim made about one has to survive an engineering department first.

Porsche was first in Brand Finance's Luxury & Premium 50 2025 for the eighth consecutive year, at $41.1 billion. That is the table and the year; there was no standalone Luxury & Premium 50 for 2026, so there is no newer number to quote and this register does not invent one. What the 2025 table does show is a house that sells an SUV in volume without letting the SUV redefine what a Porsche looks like, which is the trick the rest of the room is trying to learn.

Ferrari prints Hermès-like margins by capping production — Brand Finance put it at about $14.4 billion in that same 2025 table, up 36%. Lamborghini sells theatre: Sant'Agata took a tractor company, cut hexagonal voids into a mid-engine wedge, and let the Urus pay for the Revuelto. Rolls-Royce, the oldest house in this room at 1904, sells a room that moves. Bugatti sells a number that used to be impossible, and Limited100's 2025 Q4 index put it third of the hundred brands it ranks — above every watch house but one.

At the other end, Genesis was founded in 2015 and is the youngest house in the register outright. It is here because a register that only admits houses with a nineteenth-century address is a museum catalogue, and because the Korean argument — that luxury is a service standard before it is a badge — is the most interesting new one in the room.