The millionaire's club
By Barry Park | drive.com.au | 08 November
Rolls Royce Phantom Coupe
If last year's figures are anything to go by, Australians love a Rolls-Royce. In all, 17 of them glided out of showrooms and into private garages, representing a personal reward or the latest addition to a growing collection of fine marques.
(Of our big cities, Adelaide has the highest concentration of Rolls-Royce ownership. It's also earned a reputation as the grisly murder capital of Australia. They're a mixed lot, those crow-eaters.)
The third member of the Phantom family, the hard-topped coupe, has just arrived here, and last week Drive was invited to experience it.
The occasion is auspicious; not only do we have the new Phantom Coupe at our disposal, but also its two older siblings, the eloquent Drophead Coupe and the more stately four-door sedan that in 2003 reinvigorated the brand for its current owner, German luxury car maker BMW.
Each Phantom is distinctly different. The $915,000sedan (adding an extra 25cm to the wheelbase blows the price out to $1.095million) is stately, slab-fronted and grand in composure, and feels big on the road. It's the only one of the cars we're driving to miss out on the optional brushed steel bonnet gracing the other two cars.
There's a very different feel to the $1.19million Drophead Coupe. It has a softer look than the sedan, falling gracefully at the front and rear. It's the same length as its newer sibling and shorter than the sedan, but the feature teak deck, natural sisal floor mats and seamless leather seats give it a strong connection with the outdoors.
(While we're shooting photos, someone wanders up to ask if, for all that money, the Drophead Coupe has a canvas roof. Well, technically it does on the outer layer, but from the inside with the roof in place, all you can see of the seven layers making it up is the soft cashmere lining.)
From the front, the $1.1million Phantom Coupe - ours is black with subtle red pinstripes - looks like a Drophead with a fixed roof. The join along the top of the windscreen almost gives the impression a hard-top has just dropped into place. In a way, it has. But it's because the skin of the Coupe, from the top of the windscreen back, is formed from a single pressed sheet of metal, and the whole rear section is formed as one piece and then fixed to the car's aluminium space frame.
The big doors allow Rolls-Royce to build an uninterrupted A-pillar into the Phantom that drops from the top of the windscreen right through to the floor. You notice how well it works in the Drophead Coupe, which doesn't show any sign of the tell-tale scuttle shake of a poorly reinforced chassis.
However, that one-piece rear section makes the Coupe stand alone as the one car within the Phantom family with some real sporting potential. The Coupe sits on 21-inch tyres, providing a firmer ride. Underneath, there's a stiffer stabiliser bar at the back, a slightly different spring set-up all around, and the steering feel is slightly heavier at speed, so the Coupe's significantly thicker steering wheel loads up a lot earlier than that in the other two members of the Phantom family.
The Coupe's brakes also have more progressive feel through the pedal compared with the deliberately soft feel given to the other two cars, which are more inclined to be used for around-town chauffeur work.
And you do tend to feel the firmer settings. Put the Coupe's wheels over a white line on the road or a ribbon in the bitumen and you will feel them as a ripple through the suspension and a slight vibration through the steering wheel, whereas in the other two you won't.
There's also a touch of lairiness to the Coupe, with two exposed, chrome-tipped trapezoidal exhaust pipes hanging below the rear bumper. The other two Phantoms don't dare show theirs.
Push the chrome "S" button mounted on the steering wheel, and the Coupe is subtly transformed. The sport setting remaps the car's electronics to give a sharper link between throttle and engine, and a slightly different gearbox tune to hold gears longer while accelerating, and downshift earlier while braking.
"Everything (on the Coupe) has been subtly overdone," Matthew Bennett, the luxury marque's Japan-based regional general manager, says. "It arrives at a lower gear than the other two cars, the engine's a little further up the rev range, and the torque is a little more urgent in the way it comes in." Use the throttle with a fair percentage of enthusiasm - instead of a tachometer, the Phantom uses a "power reserve" indicator that sweeps from 100-0% - and the Coupe instantly drops gears and the 6.75-litre V12 lets out a deep, barely audible growl.
With 338kW of power on tap, and a substantial 720Nm of torque, progress is quick, although moving the 2.6-tonne bulk dampens the effect. Even so, a 5.8-second sprint from 0-100km/h for that bulk is still respectable.
And despite the weight, rapid acceleration, braking and cornering doesn't dissolve into excessive body-roll, with the Rolls' tried and true air suspension system keeping things fairly level.
Given its sporty pretensions, was there never a thought of adding paddle shifts to the steering wheel to control the six-speed automatic transmission? No, Bennett says. The Phantom is about refined, progressive motoring in a car that you can just step into and drive.
"Because of this, it must be a fully automatic gearbox and nothing else," Bennett says. "The principle of the Phantom family is not too much driver involvement, not too much stuff.
"As soon as you try and make this a sporty car, you're taking the brand to somewhere where it's not really comfortable. It is a driver-focused grand tourer, and the idea of (gear-shift) paddles is just too much."
In the time I'm around the three cars, two are potentially sold, including one of the five Coupes that will land here before year's end. The pall of a downturn doesn't hang that heavily over some parts of the new-car market, it seems.
The sales numbers - and the steady phone calls from customers - indicate that Rolls-Royce is steering a course for a record year in Australia.
The company has almost matched last year's 17sales, and with two more months to go and a new model stirring up interest, everything points to another good one.
A special function for guests in Melbourne late last week left the Coupe smeared in fingerprints, a sure sign that people were interested, Bennett says.
The soaring sales fly in the face of a world in the throes of gearing itself for a serious economic downturn.
The reason for the sales spur is simple, according to Bevin Clayton, the distributor of Rolls-Royce cars in Australia. In the main, Rolls buyers are independently wealthy and well insulated from the whims of the stockmarket.
While the Collins Street bankers nervously cast around to flog off their supercars cheaply to meet the next margin call, Rolls owners weather the storm. Most will have personal net assets worth more than $US30million ($A44million).
However, dark clouds still gather on the horizon. The Australian dollar has shed 40% of its value in the past few months, and similar to other full importers, that's going to hurt Rolls-Royce, which has based its prices on the US dollar since 2002.
Bennett admits the cheapest Phantom in the range, the $915,000 standard-wheelbase sedan, won't stay below the $1 million mark.
The company was in spirited talks last week as to where prices will reset themselves. Nothing has been settled on - yet.
"The one thing that's important to us is the base cost of the car," he says. "What we don't want to do is have prices moving up and down radically - our customers tend to think in the long term and to have different car prices within six months or one year would make people delay a purchase."
Not that owners look at the price. Bennett says many will also pick through the $20,000 to $30,000 items on the options list to customise their car.
"The cars that come into (Australia) are so different, so individual that it would be wrong for us to say this is the price of a car," he says.
Anyway, next year we should see the fourth member of the Rolls-Royce family added to the line-up - a cheaper, "baby" four-seat saloon that should slip in at around $US250,000 depending on the state of the economy.
I ask about the rumours that it will feature a twin-turbo V8engine, and the succinct reply is that every car bearing the Rolls-Royce emblem will continue to use the iconic six-and-three-quarter engine under the hood; nothing more, nothing less. But I'm told it will be more powerful than the current 338 kW output.
Rolls is introducing the smaller car - codenamed "RR4" and based on a BMW 7-Series platform with suicide rear doors - to give buyers a model that they can drive every day, rather than just slip out in it on the odd occasion.
According to Bennett, it's not a sign that a $1 million car is too expensive.
"We get new customers by offering what other car makers don't," he says. "There's no one else out there with a $1million convertible, and we see the RR4 in the same place.
"People accept the price after they've driven the car."
First published by Drive.com.au on November 08 2008
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