After a bunch of drama that's hard to sort out even if you were following it in the motoring press of the time (which I was), Volkswagen AG wound up with the old Rolls manufacturing plant in Crewe, but without the Rolls-Royce name, which wound up licensed to BMW.
The first BMW-designed Roller was the Phantom (aka the Phantom VII) super luxury sedan, released to the public in 2003 as an '04 model.
Largely constructed of aluminum... sorry, "aluminium" ...with pieces sourced from Scandinavia and Germany before final assembly at the Rolls-Royce facility in Goodwood, West Sussex, the Phantom rides on a 140.6" wheelbase and tips the scales at a bit over 5,600 pounds. Power is provided by a longitudinal BMW V-12 located under that bonnet roughly the length of the HMS Ark Royal. Displacing 6.75L and sporting an 11.0:1 compression ratio, the 48V DOHC twelve routes 453 SAE net horsepower to the rear wheels via a ZF six-speed slushbox.
If your chauffeur has a leaden loafer, this land yacht is supposed to get to sixty in a tick or two under the six second mark and will waft down the motorway at speeds up to 130mph. But nobody buys a $300 grand parlour-on-wheels to go racing, anyway.
The upper two photos were taken in April of 2024 using a Nikon D700 and a 28-200mm f/3.5-6.3 zoom lens, while the lower one was snapped with a Fuji X-T2 and XF 16-80mm f/4 R WR OIS zoom lens in July of the same year.
No comments:
Post a Comment