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 car buyers.

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.”

Editor’s note: A version of this article was first published on Fortune.com on February 25, 2025.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Brian Chesky took the stage in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday to tell a story about the future.

That story went something like this: 17 years ago, when Chesky cofounded Airbnb, people were skeptical. Who would ever stay in a stranger’s home, they snarled. (In 2008, seven investors rejected the company, turning down what would have been a 10% stake for $150,000.) But the startup defied the odds—it’s now a verb, noun, and a publicly-traded Fortune 500 company with an $84 billion market cap. 

Now, Chesky explained, it was time for the company to once again blaze a new trail by redefining what it means to “Airbnb” something. 

With the just-unveiled Airbnb Services and a relaunched Airbnb Experiences, Chesky painted a picture of a world where you rely on Airbnb as your hub for a singular vacation experience. Chesky talked about Airbnb as a marketplace for unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime moments. Think: making pasta with a chef in Rome, dancing with a K-pop star in Seoul, exploring Notre Dame with a restoration architect, wrestling with a luchador in Mexico City, or even spending a Sunday with Patrick Mahomes.

Chesky closed with a new tagline: “Now you can Airbnb more than an Airbnb.” The idea is that you’d “Airbnb” a massage on vacation—and would eventually start “Airbnb-ing” massages, makeup artists, and hair stylists not just on vacation, but when you’re at home. In short, it was the launch of a superapp that was both a mild repudiation of tech—”somewhere along the way, something drifted, and we started spending more time looking at screens and less time in the real world,” Chesky told the audience—and an incredibly Silicon Valley display. 

This presentation, in which Chesky put his best “founder mode” persona on display, was met with both fanfare and criticism. Zynga founder Mark Pincus hailed Chesky’s performance as “Steve Jobs-esque.” Others were skeptical that Airbnb users will turn to the app in their daily, non-vacation lives, and questioned the marketplace pricing Airbnb is using.

The truth, almost definitely, lies somewhere in between. 

There are certain ways in which the idea makes good sense. For example, if one of the criticisms of staying in an Airbnb is that you lose the amenities of a hotel, it tracks that the company would want to fix that. Travel is a spectacularly fragmented industry and Airbnb isn’t alone in seeing the level of white space open to consolidation—McKinsey has estimated that the global market for travel experiences is an opportunity that’s worth north of $1 trillion, but which is scattered among a few online platforms and “countless smaller operators.”

At the same time, Airbnb’s ambition of becoming a destination for experiences isn’t new; the Airbnb Experiences product is, after all, a relaunch.

Airbnb Finance Chief Ellie Mertz described the company’s earlier effort as a victim of circumstance. “We launched Experiences many years ago,” Mertz said in an interview. “We started to scale it. The pandemic hit, we put it on the back burner, and haven’t really done anything with it until this point.”

With the benefit of a “multi-year pause,” Airbnb reimagined Experiences, Mertz said, bringing more flexible pricing, stronger vetting to ensure top quality offerings, and a redesigned app that makes it easier for travelers to find and book experiences that fit their trip. 

“The current year is about launching,” she said. “We want to get these products and services into our consumers’ hands… Our ambition is to drive these businesses such that they are on a standalone basis material contributors to our top line. What Brian and I have said in the past is the ambition is that we could build these businesses into billion dollar revenue streams over an order of magnitude, in a three-to-five-year period.”

For a company that generated $11.1 billion in revenue last year, an additional billion dollars on the top line could be meaningful. But ringing up that revenue will take a lot of work, and money, as Airbnb essentially tries to create new consumer habits.

To help make the case for Airbnb Experiences, the company is launching Airbnb Originals—a set of premium experiences, underpinned by starpower. For example: Megan Thee Stallion was in the room as Chesky touted the Airbnb Original that the company curated with her—a day with the star rapper in a specially-built anime house. The goal for experiences like this is that they are days you remember for the rest of your life. 

At the end of the day, I was taken on one such surprise experience—a listening party with Chance the Rapper in LA, where the beloved indie rapper previewed about ten new songs to a room full of influencers and, well, me. We sat in a room filled with bean bag chairs, green-glowing headphones, and screens filled with lyrics. It was an hour and a half block where the world stopped. 

It was intimate, surprising, and the kind of marshalling of starpower that felt pretty authentic—Chance the Rapper, whose last studio album came out in 2019, stood at the front of the room when the demo was finished, answering questions about his music that only so many people have heard. Airbnb did not share details about the financial terms involved in partnering with these celebrities, though it seems safe to guess that whatever it is (revenue share, a fee, or some other arrangement), it’s not cheap.  

And that gets to the tricky part of what Airbnb is trying to do, as it bolts a fancy new addition onto a sharing economy, scale business. I don’t think it’s impossible that Airbnb’s push into these new verticals works—maybe I’d want to book a makeup artist through Airbnb as a consumer—but I don’t know if you can curate at scale a marketplace of singular, intimate experiences. They are often by definition limited and magic is hard to screen for quality on a global level. 

The idea is somewhat paradoxical and may very well not work as critics think. At the same time, you have to wonder—it may also be about as cock-eyed an idea as staying in other people’s homes on vacation.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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