ROCK N' ROLL
A tank of an SUV with off road capabilities, The Rolls-Royce Cullinan not only exceeds performance expectations, it is the definition of luxury, says Neil Lyndon
Nothing says luxury motoring like the magnificent Rolls Royce Cullinan
The doormen at the Gleneagles Hotel are not – we might guess – easily impressed. But when the £317,550 Rolls-Royce Cullinan smoothed up to their grand and canopied front door, they seemed, for a moment, to have been rendered momentarily speechless. ‘Welcome to Gleneagles, sir,’ stammered one, as I handed over the car’s massive ingot-like key for valet parking. Then, as if the moment merited a double dose of fulsomeness, he said the same words again.
To celebrate an important anniversary, my wife and I had decided to treat ourselves to lunch in The Century Bar at Gleneagles. To make the occasion even more special, we took the Cullinan and drove up through Glen Devon on a day when autumn mists were swirling elvishly around the hills and down the valleys. Ravishing landscape; fabulous car; delectable lunch. Could there be a more perfect picture of luxury and privilege? Throughout this jaunt, I was sensing the spirit of my long-dead father at my shoulder. That man who never once drove a new car in his entire life was grinning from ear-to-ear and murmuring, ‘Way to go, son!’
Rolls-Royce like to say that the Cullinan is their first attempt at an SUV with off-road capability; but they may be forgetting the all-terrain Silver Ghost they supplied to Lenin in 1922. Fitted with armoured-car half-tracks and capable of crossing the Russian steppes, that Ghost was one of nine Rollers that the Soviet tyrant (and passionate advocate of equality among all comrades) ordered.
The Cullinan itself struck me as being tailor-made for a military dictator, especially in the Iced Military Green paintwork with which our test car was decorated. It would perfectly have matched Fidel Castro’s battle fatigues. In fact, standing outside our back door and dwarfing our little house, it looked like nothing less than a tank.
More than 17 and a half feet long, six and a half wide and with a roof as tall as I stand at six feet, the Cullinan is by far the most enormous car ever to come to our home. Only the Transits I occasionally borrow are bigger. Everything about the Cullinan is Brobdingnagian. The capacity of the 600bhp V12 engine is 6750cc (equivalent to six standard Ford Fiestas). It weighs 2.71 tonnes. The front doors are so heavy and so wide that my wife couldn’t close hers without putting one foot out of the car. The rearward-opening ‘suicide’ doors are so colossal that, when I wanted to ride in the back seats and be driven by my wife, I couldn’t reach the door pull.
And yet, and yet…
Believe it or not, this leviathan drives like a dream. When the throttle pedal is floored, it opens its lungs, bellows like an angry bull and then shifts like a scalded cat. Acceleration from 0-60mph in under five seconds is comically improbable for such a monster. Average fuel consumption of 18.7mpg and CO2 emissions of 370-377g/km are unmentionable in these politically correct days.
It goes round corners so uncannily flat, level and stable that it could almost be a single-seater like an Atom Ariel. Ludicrously, it can actually be pushed to give a sporty account of itself on tricky country roads.
The transmission options offer a variety of suspension set-ups from somnolent to edgy. These, of course, include off-road settings but when I suggested to RollsRoyce that I might take the Cullinan on the off-road course at Gleneagles, their aghast response was like the Bateman cartoon of the man who threw a snowball at St Moritz, as if I had committed an outrage against good manners.
It goes without saying that the interior of the Cullinan is the last word in sybaritism. The list of its indulgences is as inexhaustible as a Sheikh’s boudoir. In the armrest at the back, I found a set of crystal glasses and a decanter.
Luxury or what?
‘When the throttle pedal is floored it opens its lungs and bellows like an angry bull’