2004 Rolls-Royce Phantom

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. 

2018 Rolls-Royce Wraith

While not a thunderously gauche assault on the senses in the manner of, say, an orange Culloden, a Rolls-Royce Wraith coupe is still an immense slab of vehicle; it's a hard car to miss. It's two and a half tons of metal, leather, Wilton wool, wood veneer, and twin-turbo V-12. Over seventeen feet long, with a roofline most of five feet high, it's a coupe of near SUV-proportions.

Introduced for 2014 alongside the Phantom Coupé (Rolls of course sniffily insists on the accented "e"), the Wraith pulled a name from corporate history and eventually supplanted the Phantom. Unlike its predecessor, the enormous grand tourer rides on a platform derived from that of the F07 BMW 7-series sedans.

The clear, oddly shaped headlight lenses on this Midnight Sapphire example tell us it's a 2017-2023 model, after the modest facelift. Earlier ones had rectangular lenses.

Motor Trend tested a 2014 car and claimed the 624 horsepower twin-turbo 6.6L V-12 would launch this rolling landmass to sixty in a mere 4.1 seconds and dispatch the quarter in 12.5 at a buck-fourteen. More impressively, the brakes would stop Rolls's two-door leviathan in only 109 feet from sixty, which must feel like driving into a sand dune.

I was tooling down 54th Street in Indianapolis back in August of 2021 when I noticed this beast in the parking lot at the American Legion hall, so I swung in to get photos with the little Nikon D3000 in the passenger seat.

Notice the Rolls logo is upright on all four center caps? Yeah, they don't spin. I have to replace a couple little roundel center caps on the Zed Drei every few years when they get bounced loose on Indy's bomb-cratered streets. Fortunately the plastic caps on the Bimmer are cheap. I should start keeping a spare or two in the trunk. Hopefully the ones on the Roller are more secure, since a set of four that claim to be OEM goes for seven bills on Amazon.

1978 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow II

Rolls-Royce introduced the Silver Shadow in 1965. For the 1977 model year it underwent a mild refresh which resulted in the Silver Shadow II, like the one seen above.

Powered by a 412 cubic inch pushrod V-8 breathing through a pair of SU single-venturi carburetors, it put out 170 SAE net horsepower through a GM Turbo Hydramatic 400 three-speed slushbox. (Much like MG would only refer to its cars' performance as "scintillating", Rolls-Royce ad copy would only refer to the Silver Shadow's power as "adequate".)

I believe the official names for this color combo are Ivory and Walnut.

With a bit over 30,000 cars built over a fifteen year run, the Silver Shadow and Silver Shadow II are the most numerous single model of Rolls-Royce.

In the Trivial Pursuit category, Rolls was famously going to name this model the Silver Mist, but ixnayed the plan when it was pointed out that "mist" is the German word for "manure".