Rolls-Royce Phantom
The world’s most exclusive convertible goes on sale today.
Rolls Royce super convertible, the Phantom Drophead is priced at a staggering £305,000.
But well healed motorists are paying more than £100,000 extra to jump the two year waiting list.
The Phantom Drophead is powered by a 6.75-litre V12 engine, and counts rear-opening doors and decking made from more than 30 pieces of solid teak among its unique features.
Rolls’ first new convertible since the Corniche is said to “echo the timeless styling of the great Rolls Royce cars”, and its wooden rear quarters encapsulate an “elegant motor yacht at speed”.
Despite tipping the scales at three tons, the new Rolls is capable of reaching 60mph in less than six seconds, before reaching a limited top speed of 149mph.
As ever, Rolls’ attention to detail is meticulous.
The interior has hides from 17 bulls, bred in barbed wire-free pastures in Austria. Rolls Royce insists on only using bulls to avoid the stretch marks which cows have after calving.
It also has 20-inch alloys, with a weighted ‘RR’ logo to always remain upright and rear-opening doors which close at the touch of a button.
Prospective buyers could even spend another £200,000 on optional extras; including a £6,500 brushed steel bonnet and monograms etched into the wooden door caps or embroidered into the seats – at £940 a go.
Each Phantom Drophead takes 450 man hours to build at Rolls’ underground factory on the Goodwood estate in West Sussex, and the German-owned car maker is rumoured to be recruiting several hundred more workers to satisfy demand.
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May 25th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
F Scott Fitzgerald springs to mind when one thinks of Rolls-Royce owners. His redolent portraits of the impossibly rich and handsome, such as The Great Gatsby, or Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night, sum up how I’d like them to be. Such characters would, of course, be far too mannered even to whisper the names of their chauffeur-driven cars, although you could just imagine it was a drophead Rolls-Royce in which the Divers cruised the French Riviera, with their crew of fawning, gorgeous neophytes in the passenger seats.
Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupé
Money no object: for your £305,000, you get a beautifully designed luxury conveyance powered by the BMW 7-series V12 engine and capable of 149mph
They wouldn’t mention the name of this car partly because it is such a mouthful. Old Rolls-Royce simply called its drophead model Corniche, but new BMW-owned Rolls-Royce pompously insists on less of a name and more of a technical description: The Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupé -TRRPDC for short.
In fact, it is nothing of the sort, least of all a coupé, but then the idle rich are no longer anything like Fitzgerald’s cursed and fascinating subjects. They have been observed, pursued and collected like specimens in a killing jar. A 21st-century Gatsby is now described as “a high net-worth individual”; there are 85,000 of them around the world, 20,000 in western Europe and 7,500 in Britain. One in 8,000 Britons is a HNWI. Do you know one? There seems so little mystery about these leisured classes; they own five properties, ocean-going yachts, swimming pools, works of art and jet aircraft. Where does this information come from? Did the obscenely rich not notice the spy in their immaculate gardens, or the accountants rummaging through their dustbins?
At least their jet aircraft would enable the world’s HNWIs to get to the Tuscany launch of TRRPDC without first being roughed up by the British Airports Authority, Alitalia, and Roman immigration. You know a launch is going to be one long panic when it dawns that you’ll spend four times as long getting there as you will in the car. Perhaps this was R-R reminding us that the rich, as Fitzgerald was wont to observe, are different from you and me.
This car is essentially the 100EX concept, introduced at the annual Rolls-Royce jaw-drop launch at the 2003 Geneva motor show. It was built to celebrate the centenary of Henry Royce’s first meeting with Charles Rolls at the Midland Hotel, Manchester, in 1904. In 2004 we joined the 100EX at Goodwood on the first stage of its double circumnavigation of the globe to test reaction to its design, which came from Marek Djordjevic (exterior) and Charles Coldham (interior). Chief designer Ian Cameron belted us round the Goodwood Motor Circuit in the V16-engined convertible. Very Gatsby, a V16. Cadillac made the first V16, but Henry Royce considered the configuration himself.
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Cadillac returned to the idea when it unveiled the Cadillac Sixteen at the 2003 Detroit Auto Show. Its hand-built, all-aluminum-alloy, 13.6-litre V16 delivered 1,000bhp and 1,000lb ft of torque. Unsurprisingly, Cadillac decided not to build such a gargantuan piece of hardware and it sounds as though even the world’s HNWIs balked at the cost of a V16 in a convertible Rolls-Royce. Or did they? That BMW V16 gave the 100EX an undeniably exclusive presence and a different shape from this production car - longer, leaner and, to the eye at least, lower. It was a truly magnificent machine and the engine’s gentle whoosh sounded like no other, as if the rarest and most mysterious zephyrs had been trapped under the bonnet. I’ve since met two Americans who were so taken with it they would have paid anything (being HNWIs, they were good for it, too).
Instead, however, the production car gets the stroked version of the BMW 7-series V12 that also goes into the Phantom saloon. This 6.75-litre lump delivers 453bhp and 149mph performance. Thanks to an additional 154lb of aluminium alloy, which is used to strengthen the sills and to radius every 90-degree joint, the drophead is not as quick as the Phantom, but the frame is very stiff. The engine drives the rear wheels through a six-speed automatic transmission, which is also supplied complete in a subframe by BMW.
A standard TRRPDC will cost you £305,000 before you dive into the options list. The hideously arriviste, bare stainless steel bonnet will set you back £6,350 and is surely retrograde coachwork material considering the rest of the body is lightweight aluminium alloy, which has to be sealed against the electro-corrosive effects of contact with the bonnet. The bling 21in chromium-plated wheels are an extra £4,500 and you can also select caulked teak rear decking (£5,699), a veneered instrument panel to replace the nasty, knurled-finish metal (£822) and a range-topping sound system (about £20,000).
Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupé
Smooth: the Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupé handles immaculately
The build process involves 450 man hours and each car has an amazing hand-welded aluminium-alloy spaceframe imported from Dingolfing, Germany, the largest powered hood of any car and a cabin upholstered with 17 separate hides cut into 450 individual parts before being hand-stitched together. Bear in mind that the chassis weighs 1,212lb, the engine 772lb and the gearbox 331lb, so the rolling chassis tallies about 2,500lb. Yet when solid teak, veneers, bolts of cloth, complete hides of leather, hessian mats and wool carpets are added, the total checks in at 5,622lb. That’s a lot of interior.
And for all its (relatively) humdrum power unit, the drophead is undeniably special and elegant. From its slatted headlamps to its curvaceous rear-hinged “suicide” doors, the body tapers beautifully towards the rear, adding grace (if not exactly lightness) to the shape. The boot has a horizontal split, with the lower half folding down to form a seat or occasional perch for point-to-point spectators. Chief executive Ian Robertson tried to explain the ease with which women could exit the drophead in a short skirt without revealing acres of thigh, but his female colleagues gave him an old-fashioned look. Try to push luggage into the back seat with the hood up, however, and those same doors will give you a sharp clout on the ear, which is perhaps what Robertson would have received if he’d pushed his analogy much further.
It’s the details that make the whole so delightful: the small rear lamps, the tiny swages in the coachwork and the twin creases that lighten its enormous depth. The Spitfire fighter-inspired windscreen surround still looks too heavy, though, especially when it and the bonnet are left in bare stainless steel.
Inside, Coldham’s interior is more lively than that of the Phantom and the cabin is a wonderful place to sit, especially in the front. You don’t sink into the seats of a Rolls-Royce (note for budding authors). Rather, the trim yields to your weight and touch, but slightly reluctantly, as if it would rather you left it alone. Thanks to the enormous hood well, the rear seat is accommodating rather than commodious and, with the hood furled (it takes 30 seconds), quite draughty. I thought the Bentley Azure had a better protected and more comfortable rear seat. The boot is really quite small and only medium-sized suitcases will fit.
Thanks to my colleague from the snoreaway Sun, we made a tardy start. As we pounded out of the driveway in the English-White TRRPDC, we must have looked as though we were late for a wedding, with the bride’s mother in the back. No owner would drive his car like we did that morning (we reduced the 18mpg EU Combined fuel economy to 7mpg), but at get-me-to-the-church-on-time speeds, the drophead answered the call and our commands immaculately.
The suspension is soft and the ride cossetting, but the body control is very impressive. The drophead doesn’t float or heel like a drunk, even under high cornering loads, and it feels a little sharper than the saloon in its responses. The levels of grip are high, but the stability controls are slightly intrusive, damping down over-enthusiasm before you’ve got going. The rack-and-pinion steering is light and accurate, but doesn’t have a lot of feel. You helm the drophead rather than steer it, and rely on your senses to tell you what is happening to the wheels. That said, it is a very swift cross-country conveyance and the only thing preventing it from being absolutely great is the old-fashioned feel of the transmission, which struggles to change down fast enough when needed. It also slams through its six speeds with surprising abruptness for a Rolls-Royce.
Cars as heavy as this have a natural speed at which they are most happy and the drophead, although sharper than the Phantom saloon, is slightly faster than stately but a country mile off the pace of the Bentley Azure, which would eat it alive in a straight fight. In fact, TRRPDC feels somewhat slower than its maker claims.
In the end, there is only one competitor to the curiously named Rolls-Royce: the £222,500 Bentley Azure is faster and just as big, but slightly less of a stand-out design and a bit of a mongrel when it comes to provenance - ironically, BMW helped with the design of its saloon sister, the Arnage. The extra performance of the Bentley is a big plus, as is the saving of £82,500, but then when do the rich worry about such details? For my money, they’ll be far more concerned about the stupid name. Azure sounds much nicer than Phantom Drophead Coupé. If you can come up with a better-sounding name for the Rolls, drop me a line; I’ll donate the launch “gift” to the best one I get.
Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupé [tech/spec]
Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupé
Price/availability: £305,000. On sale now, but there’s waiting list of almost two years.
Engine/transmission: 60-degree, 6,749cc petrol V12 with belt-driven DOHC per bank and four valves per cylinder; 453bhp at 5,350rpm and 531lb ft of torque at 3,500rpm. Six-speed automatic gearbox, rear-wheel drive.
Performance: top speed 149mph, 0-60mph in 5.9sec, EU Urban fuel consumption 12.2mpg, CO2 emissions 377g/km.
We like: Coldham’s interior styling, Djordjevic’s cool coachwork, effortless performance and cruising ability.
We don’t like: Stupendous price, sluggish transmission, arriviste bare-metal bonnet, haphazard dashboard layout with silly gauges.
Alternatives: Mercedes-Benz Maybach, from £263,125. Bentley Azure, from £222,500.