It’s the Ghost with the most
Rolls-Royce’s super-luxury limo is reborn
SIR HENRY Royce famously urged his engineers to ‘take the best that exists, and make it better’. And more than a century later that’s exactly what the carmaker he co-founded is still trying to do, with the launch of the all-new Rolls-Royce Ghost. Rolls claims that its £250,000 superluxury limo is the most technologically advanced car it has ever made, with clever new systems that can remove noise, pollution and even smooth-out potholes. But it’s also a true, traditional Rolls-Royce, with ten pampered cows providing the flawless hides required for the cabin, and the firm’s Bespoke division able to make your Ghost unique.
But the new car has a hard act to follow. The outgoing Ghost was launched in 2009 and has been its bestselling model in a 114-year history. It helped drive down the average age of Rolls-Royce buyers from 56 to just 43, and to push global
sales of the Sussex-based marque above 5,000 cars for the first time last year – an increase of a quarter on 2018.
The firm estimates that a fifth of its customers are now from the worlds of music, sport, film and fashion, with David Beckham and Jennifer Lopez regularly pictured using their Ghosts in Los Angeles.
But with the introduction in 2018 of the Cullinan, Rolls-Royce’s first SUV, and the recent redesign of its even larger and more expensive Phantom flagship, this new Ghost will have more in-house competition for the Instagram feeds of the young, successful and wealthy.
Rolls-Royce says the only features left unchanged over the outgoing model are the retractable Spirit of Ecstasy bonnet mascot and the umbrellas hidden in the dramatic ‘suicide’ rear doors.
It boasts a twin-turbocharged, 6.75-litre V12 engine making 571 horsepower, enough to propel this 18ft long, 2.5-ton limo to 60mph in a supercar-standard 4.6 seconds, and on to a top speed limited to 155mph. Standard all-wheel drive means that power can be deployed even in poor conditions, and allwheel steering cuts this leviathan’s turning circle in town.
Such stonking performance will be appreciated by those owners who choose to drive themselves – Rolls-Royce estimates that fewer than a quarter of its customers now employ a chauffeur.
But one change you won’t see is the addition of a hybrid or electric powertrain. While most new models from other makers now offer the option of silent, emissions-free electric running, the Ghost is sticking with petrol power.
A Rolls has never needed an electric motor to be whisper-quiet anyway, and the new Ghost’s engineers claim that this will be their most refined model ever.
At a time when other carmakers are trying to reduce the weight of their cars to hit emissions targets, Rolls has added 100kg of sounddeadening material to the new
Ghost. It also ‘tuned’ all major components to resonate at the same frequency, producing a single, subtle background ‘note’.
It even experimented with a completely silent cabin, but riding in it proved too weird. Two other new systems can remove not only noise but pollution, and eliminate the jolt from potholes too.
The Ghost’s Micro-Environment Purification System, or MEPS, can scrub the cabin air of even ultra-fine pollution particles in just two minutes.
The car’s Flagbearer system, named after the men who walked ahead of the very earliest cars carrying a red flag to warn pedestrians of its approach, uses cameras mounted behind the windscreen to read the road ahead, and can move the suspension before it hits a bump or pothole, cancelling out the jolt.
Inside, as well as the usual silky leather, a Ghost logo appears in the dashboard surrounded by 850 LED stars when you open one of the doors, which, if you wish, come with electric assistance.
Outside, Rolls-Royce has chosen to make the Ghost a little less arrogant-looking to suit the mood of the times, but the famous Pantheon grille is now subtly illuminated from behind at night, so other road users will be left in no doubt as to what has just appeared in their rear-view mirror.
The famous Ghost name dates back more than a century, and has its origins in the Silver Ghost nickname given to the silver-painted, near-silent demonstrator the company built in 1907. The name stuck, and was soon officially adopted by Rolls-Royce. That original Silver Ghost would sell for tens of millions of pounds now, if it ever came to auction. At ‘just’ a quarter of a million and with even more refinement, this new Ghost is a bargain.