Above all, these vehicles are almost affordable. At “only” €160,000, the Bentley Continentals are among the most accessible of the new breed; the two-door GT version is the best-selling car in the class, the four-door Flying Spur third. Spending six figures on a car doesn’t seem so outrageous when an ordinary house in many European cities will set you back seven figures. The greatest beneficiaries have been firms like Aston, Bentley and Lamborghini, which have introduced new, cheaper model lines to capitalise on the exclusivity and desirability they built up by being too expensive for too long. Ferrari has always had cars in the segment now priced at around €150,000, so its growth hasn’t been as spectacular. It seems that all the European luxury car brands had to do to achieve this growth was to offer more cars; most of the customers’ cash was already there, simply waiting to be spent. They haven’t been the beneficiaries of a boom with its roots elsewhere; they created it.

“Previously, there was a wall for the customers,” explains Bentley’s patrician chairman Dr Franz-Josef Paefgen. “The money was there before, but there was no product. If owners of an Audi A8 wanted to move up, they had to double their spending to get an Arnage or a Phantom. There is a very small number of people with more or less unlimited wealth who are crazy enough to buy one of these super-luxurious cars. You need a strong personality to turn up at a restaurant in one.

“This more or less totally out-of-the-range segment above €250,000 is still producing around 3,000 cars each year in total,” Paefgen continues. “Although more product is being offered now, there is no significant growth. When we put the Bentley into the €150,000 sector, however, the customers immediately said, ‘there’s something we could go to’, and the segment grew up to 20,000 cars in a very short time.”

Aston Martin’s charismatic racing-driver chairman and CEO, Dr Ulrich Bez, concurs: “It’s clear that there are lots of high-net-worth individuals in the world, and there are a hundred times more who have the money but who do not yet buy a car like this. It’s very simple; you don’t spend money on a product you don’t like. Each new product has different character, so the market grows by new offerings.”

Of course, such rapid growth isn’t without dangers, and not every car launched in the super-luxury sector is guaranteed to succeed. Mercedes-Benz has been stung twice by failing new models; its €400,000 Maybach limousine brand was panned by critics, and just a fifth of an anticipated annual production of 1,500 is currently being sold. The €475,000 SLR supercar, built for Mercedes by McLaren, received an equally lukewarm response; four years into a seven-year production run, only a third of a planned total of 3,500 have been sold.

The big problems now facing Bentley and the other successful super-luxury brands are those usually associated with periods of rapid growth: how to maintain the production quality so critical to perceived value in this sector, how to ensure the infrastructure of the business keeps pace with demand and volume, and how to cope with an economic downturn and avoid overcapacity.

Hardest of all, these brands must somehow maintain their exclusive image when we regularly see their cars on the school run; not only are thousands more being bought, but they’re out on the streets and not stashed away in carefully climate-controlled garages. Privately, Ferrari insiders say they will get around the problem by directing their extra production to new markets such as China, where ordinary car fans would be lucky to spot one a year, thus maintaining their rarity on the streets of Europe and the US.

Unsurprisingly, Paefgen is bullish about all these potential pitfalls. “Statistics show that wealth worldwide is growing on a consistent basis every year. The money is there, and some people will still buy cars even if there is a downturn. The only problem would be something like another 9/11, where the overall atmosphere is just not right to spend so much money on a car.

“As for exclusivity, the only place where this is problematic is in the West End of London on a Friday afternoon,” he continues. “Even if we only sold 3,000 cars, we’d still have this same problem; if the car is very hot, the people who own one tend to congregate in the same places. If you live in Mayfair, you might think our Continental is the UK’s best-selling car!”