Half a million euro. At the height of the boom, you would have struggled to buy a house in Dublin for that much, but with the sharp and sudden shock the market has suffered in the past 12 months or so, you could now assemble a tidy little property portfolio for that money. But if you listen to the experts, the days of massive property windfalls are over. It’s about time Ireland got over its strange obsession with the built environment and got itself a proper economy. One based on fleets of lightning-fast, impossibly sleek and astoundingly expensive supercars, perhaps?

Enter Lexus, formerly a purveyor of sober, suited executive cars for sober, suited executives, but nowadays a company that is starting to show its wild side. The first hint came in the form of the fantastic IS-F. Working on their own initiative and in their own time, a group of Lexus engineers shoved a hulking great V8 under the bonnet of the firm’s mid-range executive saloon, tweaked and fine-tuned its suspension and transmission to perfection, and then showed it off to their bosses. They liked what they saw, and the rest is tire-smoking, motorway-devouring history. But now things are about to get really serious, as after 10 years of intense development, Lexus has at last officially taken the wraps off its first-ever supercar – the LFA.

Let’s just trot out some numbers, shall we? The LFA is powered by a 552hp, 480Nm, 4.8-litre, mid-mounted V10 engine that redlines at a screaming 9,000rpm. It sprints to 100km/h in less than four seconds and keeps going until 325km/h (a shade over 200mp/h). Just 500 will be built, by hand, at a rate of 20 per month, by a dedicated team in Toyota’s Motomachi factory. But what about the most significant number attached to this car – its price? The LFA will be available in the UK for around £336,000, but once Irish VRT is taken into account, the retail price here balloons to a staggering €580,000. That’s many times the price of another extremely capable, extremely advanced Japanese sports car, namely Nissan’s GT-R, which can be bought in the UK for the comparatively bargain-basement sum of £60,000. That car has seen off the challenge of Ferraris and Porsches twice its price in several comparison tests, so can the LFA really be worth it? In cold, hard, technical terms, probably not. There’s little doubt that it will offer a truly scintillating driving experience, but what the 500 lucky LFA buyers will really be paying for is exclusivity – it’s probable that Lexus will never come close to making something this extreme again. In years to come, it will very likely be cherished as one of the last greats to emerge from the age of the supercar.