Driving The Blackest Rolls-Royce EVER! | Top Gear

[Music] that's close your eyes what do you see black plants are born out of black and life succumbs to it no other color has an emotional response quite light black the first color we use to paint using animal fat and charcoal black is worn by priests but also favored equally by fashion designers and fascists black is the primordial color the og is used in art music architecture and unsurprisingly cars but there's one manufacturer who's doubled down on it by producing a whole range around black it's rolls royce with their black badge models here they are they started in 2016 with the ghost and wraith and then 2017 with the dawn 2019 with the cullinan the black badge cars are the more performance orientated and youthful side to the range the alter ego to the traditional posher stiff upper lip rolls royce they're made for the people who come to spec them in street wear rather than suits pay for them in crypto rather than checks you may think this is something new for a new market but rolls royces that are big and expensive and built solely around black aren't this is hunt house home to the rolls-royce enthusiast club since 1977 this has been a posh storage facility for all things rolls royce from archive material to memorabilia it's also where malcolm tucker rolls royce's historian of walking encyclopedia tends to hang out he also knows a thing or two about black so malcolm thank you so much for having us here at hunt house when did black rolls royces become a thing and why well originally i mean going way back in the early days of the 1930s it was becoming just a popular fashion things for most cars to be black but you wouldn't call a really black badger for what we're talking about today 2016 was the launch of the black badge range for the rolls-royce cars made at goodwood at the moment and before that there were a couple of extras there was two particular cars the duke of gloucester in 1960 ordered a rolls royce phantom 5 limousine and that's rather similar to the royal car fleet as you see majesty the queen driving around in that kind of car and his speciality was to have black shiny black on the vertical surfaces of the car and on the horizontal surfaces the roof the boot and the bonnet was matte black with all tiny back window and he had his own mascot which was an eagle in flight instead of the rolls-royce spirit of ecstasy later on 1965 a chap called john lennon he ordered an all-black car now he wanted his to be completely black so he had black shiny paint the wheels were painted black the bumpers were plated black the door handles were painted black the windows were blacked out which was the first time in the western hemisphere it happened you did see cars with blacktown or dark should i say darker windows not totally black in india the purder cars where the maharajas would have dark windows for the cars that transported their wives so they weren't allowed for religious reasons to be seen with the general public so that's where the first darkened glass came in but for the western hemisphere uh the cars that the car that john lennon had was about the first one so john lennon the man famed for having you know quite a psychedelic rolls-royce later was the man who officially murdered them out first well actually i'm going to pull you up there because it was never psychedelic it was canal art and roboty art that there's that car was done and there's nothing psychedelic about it if you look at it carefully that was the black car and then when they were getting involved with the maharishi's in india change of thought we want something bright we want something to reflect what was happening with their lives at the time so we had the car painted it was really actually just household paint they did it and then hand painted on all the artwork well we may have something outside that can better john lennon's black car because we may have a blacker one that's the history of black rolls royces but what is the future well it's this the latest the black badge ghost and not just any black rolls royce but the blackest rolls royce ever specked shove that in your archive tough look isn't it it's amazing what one color can do to take the restrained lines of the ghost to make it a bit more potent and where the old ghost was a seven series and gucci garbs this is all new aluminium underpinnings but let's talk about that black magic first up paint it's the deepest darkest heaviest black ever put on a rolls royce 45 kilos of the stuff slathers the car the coach line black and hand painted wheels and brakes carbon fiber barrels aluminium hubs titanium fasteners calipers finished in black the spirit vexi and pantheon grill zapped with a special electrolyte to give that smokey look rather than shiny chrome on the inside behind these black tinted glass is black leather it's on the seats the door cards around the steering wheel on the tables but it's also piped with more black leather and black pillows with black rolls royce motifs but also under my feet black lambswool from the bougiest black bar bars there's a black headlining with black shooting stars there's the technical fiber across the dash in the door cards on the side here which hides a first the black decanter from rolls royce with matching black glassware and finally behind the black lemonisco is a black fridge with more black champagne flutes but no black champagne i think we could do something about that [Music] welcome to champaign france home of very posh drinks perfect to fill up that very parched fridge back there but also some fantastic roads to test whether this rolls royce ghost black badge the driver's car is any good so his eleanor the good old spirit of ecstasy up front kicked off her slippers and put on her running spikes well yes kind of because there are lots of differences to the ghostback brad but none of them are mechanical everything is software related so we have the same 6.75 twin turbo v12 engine up front but it has just had a tiny different map chain so it's got 29 horsepower more so you're nudging 600 horsepower plus a slight uplifting torque too but also the air suspension is more volumous as rolls-royce would say what that means is they've put more air in the bags so it doesn't roll as much and that and the plane are suspension does work it reads the road ahead and if you're driving more actively it will know that and then it will counter the roll which it does quite effectively for a big old bus but the one thing that does make the difference is this low mode think of it as aristocratic sport button because rolls royce don't use words like sport button putting it in low mode tightens up the throttle but also it changes the exhaust it makes it slightly more raucous for a rolls royce this is no rs3 with pops and bangs but it does make it more of a sporty feeling and this car as strange as its sound to drive a rolls-royce faster is enjoyable if not a bit more oxymoronic but hustling you know two and a half tons of 5.5 meters of land you're around is enjoyable and the brakes well they're no different to a standard ghost but the pedal has more bite higher up and less travel that's something that an f1 driver asks for not a chauffeur and this is a quick car it does not 60 in four and a half seconds and with that four-wheel steer and all-wheel drive puts its power down so you can drive it quickly it is fun it is the spirited rolls-royce for the drivers well the best one in the range but it does become thirsty work hustling one of these up a hill luckily i know somewhere that can sort that out this is leclerc breon a champagne house doing remarkable things on we have to admit an unremarkable looking street in france's bubbly district but the real magic here isn't found on a shelf it's hidden in an ancient subterranean cellar 60 meters underground [Music] that's better [Music] see this isn't your normal bottle of champagne in fact it's another example how black has come into the fold of the luxury industry this spent one year of its life 60 meters at the bottom of the ocean [Music] then in that very dark room why because it makes the bubbles bubblier and it's just another example of how black has become a magnet for the luxury industry but there's one place i know where it's prominent more than ever and this car will fit in there perfectly problem is it's a bit of a schlep away luckily the ghost hasn't lost its long-legged ability so we better hit the road [Music] a 400 mile journey after a long day is something that normally gives you nightmares not in a rolls royce the ghost gobbles up miles like mr creosote it doesn't matter if it's massaging your kidneys on a motorway or silently winding you up a steep beautiful alpine pass no matter where you're driving has a natty ability to shrink distance before you know it you're parked on an icy runway here we are then somewhere a lot colder but where black and luxury go together like caviar and bellini's caution val 1850 up here the higher you get the richer people get and the more luxury and black luxury that you see where there is multi-million pound black chalets skis covered in black or tiny little cute fluffy black dogs plus black helicopters because ski lifts are for paupers but how good do all these items look it shows the mystique that comes with items and luxury black but there's a black that is more exclusive and sought after than any other black in fact it's a black that's blacker than black it's vantablack and it's fascinating [Music] in this light industrial unit there's lots of clever people in lab coats doing amazing things because they are making the darkest man-made material on planet earth phantom black see where you see my jumper as being black this is super black but how you make it will melt your mind in order to find out i need to speak to the man who made it a man called ben a fast talking fellow who really is quite clever so vance black how does it work okay so vanderbilt's a really interesting material imagine a forest of trees and the trees are about 3000 meters tall closely packed together light comes into those trees bounces around and is absorbed and then converted to heat and dissipated through whatever the material was coated onto how do you make that forest of trees that suck in light so that's really interesting it's based on nanomaterials so it's essentially like sowing nano grass okay so we sow the seeds we create these nano clusters of materials that are very very very small thousands of times smaller than the human hair and then we subject them to heat under very specific conditions and we add carbon gas to it and what happens it grows out of these little nanoparticles to form these forest of trees and then what you see is this super black surface because everything's arranged almost perfectly and perpendicular to the substrate so light gets into it almost falls into it bounces around and is trapped and dissipated as heat in the substrate so where is vantablack used then so you might be quite surprised actually it's used in cars more than you'd think especially with adas systems automated driver assistance systems so all the sensors on cars today need protection from sunlight to keep the car safe whilst it's driving along and these coatings are used to protect those sensor systems all over the car because you know what it's like when you drive down the road and the sun comes into your eyes now imagine a camera system dealing with that in all autonomous modes but vanessa black's not just used in autonomous systems i've also seen it used in watches in the art world and you sprayed a bmw x6 black that wasn't going to space it's just ugly so why did you spray it black and you know why did it look bizarre to everyone else the car was coated um to see what it would look like if you took all dimensionality away from it even when you got up close to it your perception of the shape and how it filled the room was very very different so we've spent the blackest rolls royce ever this feels like a perfect fit to have a vantablack rolls royce black badge ghost surely we can go out and put in the spray booth now is that something that we can do this afternoon um i think that would be a really really good idea but maybe you need a bigger budget i mean we're talking north of six figures here right yeah we don't quite have that but what we can do is show you this wow an iconic shape the spirit of ecstasy coated in vantablack and as you can see what we were talking about earlier on where the light is absorbed uniformly from all angles this is a perfect example because all the features are lost and your perception of how it occupies 3d space around you because it's so black and uniformly absorbing is very different than what you would normally expect with a conventional black ping it doesn't have the you're right that normal sculpture that you're so used to seeing is kind of lost in itself it's like you can see the light being sucked into it it's kind of got a velvety look and feel to it all like a really posh truffle chocolate or something so can i just take this outside and bolt it onto the front of the car now is that how it works is she going to be happy flying there you could but dust would be attracted to it very quickly and because of the contrast of dust compared to the super black surface it would look like little diamonds speckled with diamonds that's kind of up rolls royce owners street but if you say that i can't put it on the front of the car maybe it'll look right on my office desk because gosh she looks absolutely stunning like that and it's the only one in the world only one in the world the only one ever done there you go vantablack the perfect cherry on top of our blackest rolls royce ever a reserved and shy emblem of look at me that you can't actually see and the end of our noir journey [Music] so black quite a complex thing for a relatively simple shade of paint there's more to it than you probably thought but it's safe to say that black isn't going out of fashion anytime soon so don't be surprised if you see a few more rolls-royce models with black badges on them they're here to stay

Channel: Top Gear

Views: 598,952

Keywords: Top Gear, Top Gear Series, Car Review, Car Compare, BBC, BBC Studios, Chris Harris, rolls royce, rolls royce ghost, rolls royce ghost 2022, rolls royce ghost pov, rolls royce ghost black badge, rolls royce ghost 2, rolls royce ghost review, rolls royce ghost black badge 2022, black badge rolls royce, ghost black badge 2022, classic cars, luxury cars, bbc top gear, rolls royce star roof, rolls royce car, street car video

Id: YDJOqkDOVgs

Length: 16min 34sec (994 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 29 2022