Dare to Be Different

Chong Seow Wei

There it was, so charmingly glossy and stately: the Rolls-royce Cullinan in the flesh. We had been patiently waiting for this launch for three years, ever since Rolls-royce Motor Cars announced in 2015 that it would be introducing an entirely new “high-bodied” model. We were finally invited to a private preview of the car in April within the confines of a private museum in Beijing, but weren’t allowed to share any information until its world premiere on May 10. As such, security was tight—we were chauffeured to the secret location, and upon arrival, our smartphones were sealed in an opaque plastic bag to prevent pictures of the car from being taken and leaked out. In recent years, luxury marques such as Lamborghini and Bentley have released their own SUVS, but the Cullinan is hardly the result of this upward trend—rolls-royce has never been one to follow the convoy, anyway. Utilitarian Rolls-royces have existed in the Goodwood-based marque’s history, then-design director Giles Taylor told us at the preview. (Taylor has since left the company abruptly less than a month later.) Cases in point: Silver Ghosts driven by Maharajahs and Maharanis across India and through jungles in the early 1900s, and the fleet of Rolls-royces transformed into armoured war vehicles years later by British commanders riding across northern Europe and into China, Russia and the Middle East. In other words, Rolls-royce had readily available sources of inspiration to build more utilitarian cars that could easily