NEW Rolls-Royce Ghost: Road Review | Carfection 4K

the rolls-royce ghost so called because it sometimes seems to be haunted with poltergeists as passengers no no no no no no no nothing to do with being haunted or pulsed or anything like that ghost is in fact the oldest name used by rolls royce now obviously you know henry royce the engineer behind rolls royce and charles rolls who is well he's sometimes unfairly i think just characterized as a salesman but you might not have heard of claude johnson he's sometimes referred to as the hyphen in rolls-royce because he was such an important character in those early years now the first car that was actually produced under the rolls-royce badge was the 40-50 horsepower and claude johnson thought that won't do really so you had one painted silver and named the silver ghost and that then caught on for all the subsequent cars right up until the phantom in 1925. so it's a very historic name ghost and this is the latest ghost no longer is it based on a bmw 7 series instead it makes use of the same proprietary rolls-royce underpinnings as you'll find in the cullinan and current phantom there is talk of post opulence with the design which is a rather bronze sewell way of saying it's more subtle than phantom a touch more rounded a little less imposing a more discreet design for perhaps more discreet customers personally i think the front is still distinctive while not being overt but the back is perhaps a little too anonymous i do rather like the regal midnight sapphire paint of this car though beautifully understated everything is relative of course because you can't really call something that's over five and a half meters long and 2.15 meters wide discrete or understated and it does feel gargantuan to drive not really because the steering is particularly imprecise quite the opposite in fact but more because the view out it makes it so hard to place you sit quite high up it's almost sort of like mini suv view out but you've got this enormous bonnet it's a good job the spirit of ecstasy is up here otherwise you wouldn't know it end it's it's like a a sort of infinity pool in front of you i have no idea what's over there whatsoever where does where does it all end squeezing it down narrow country lanes or through narrow city streets is nerve-wracking under that enormous bonnet is a six and three quarter liter not 6.75 that doesn't sound quite right six and three quarter litre twin turbocharged v12 putting out 563 brake horsepower and 629 pounds foot of torque despite the fact this car weighs 2490 kilos that's enough to actually propel it from naught to 60 miles an hour in 4.6 seconds and onto a top speed that's limited to miles an hour the 8-speed gearbox if you put it into low which is really the only mode choice you have in this car does pick up surprisingly quickly and makes it responsive on the way out of corners in a way that you might not expect for a rolls royce v12 sounds pretty good as well when it wakes up [Applause] with all-wheel drive to give consummate traction and all-wheel steering that can angle the rear wheels up to five degrees the ghost actually has a surprising turn of pace down a road it feels a bit inappropriate like having a kick about after work in your suit and tie and going in for a slight tackle in your savile row but that doesn't mean it's not enjoyable but driving this car quickly that's not really what it's about it's actually at its most enjoyable when it's soothing its way down the road it's at a more refined pace that you can enjoy this car's most pleasing quality it's ride this car actually has the full suite of planar technology so it has things that even the cullinan and phantom 8 don't yet have it has the flag bearer system which harks back to the chappies to walk in front of cars with a red flag and that reads the road ahead thanks to cameras and then adapts the suspension and the 12-volt anti-roll system in the rear so that it will soak up the bumps that are on their way to the wheels this also has the gps gearbox which ensures you're gently shuffled into the correct gear in plenty of time to cope with the severity of whatever corners lie ahead on the road it's so good that most of the time you don't even notice there's any swapping of ratios going on and with all that talk you suspect that half the eight gears would probably suffice then there is something that is unique to this car at the moment this has mass dampers on the upper wishbones they're there because there were some troubles with just the very smallest of bumps particularly at low speed and just ironing those out things that the air suspension couldn't quite cope with anyway an engineer came in apparently after hours and came up with the idea of the mass dampening but essentially it's three kilos on top of a wishbone normally that would be undesirable because it's unsprung weight but in a car of this sort of size it doesn't matter so much i like the fact that somebody came in after hours and i think henry royce would have liked that as well given that he designed the adjustable shock absorber on his deathbed literally sketched it on the back of an envelope handed it to his nurse who's dead the next morning the talk that i mentioned before 629 pounds but that also helps you drive this smoothly because it arrives at just 1600 rpm or only 600 rpm after tick over and that means it's got an almost well electric delivery i suppose and i mean because obviously electric cars have all their talk from zero revs it's one of the reasons i think actually rolls royces will be suited to being full evs in the future all of this means that the ride is sumptuous the word that people always use is waft but actually rolls royce describes it in a way that i rather like they describe it as like flying on land so i shall no longer say waff i shall say flying on land of course the magnificent ride quality isn't really for the benefit of the person driving the car it's for those in the back in fact an awful lot of the technology and toys are for the entertainment of the occupants of the rear seats so let's have a look back there power close of course because well why would you want to shut a door yourself and this wouldn't be a rolls royce review if i didn't mention the umbrellas secreted within the rear doors you can have them matched to your car and when you put them back in here wet this sheath is now heated so that next time you get it out have a nice dry umbrella [Music] anyway the obvious traits of luxury you know continue in here if i start i've got a huge amount of leg room these seats obviously heat and cool and pummel you with massaging functions the headrests pretty much better than any pillow i think i've ever laid my head on we have the fridge in here two settings so you're gonna have sort of normal ski resort or arctic presumably a couple of champagne flutes room for a bottle of bollinger and then in here we have the tray tables which fold down like this with a huge screen that comes out you can watch television in here or just check the navigation things like that you fold this away again up into here nicely embossed spirit effects on the back of there as well obviously control all that i'm in here by your own i drive controller as you have in the front the materials are obviously all very wonderful with them i'm just leather one piece here the sort of leaked glass behind the door handle there and then of course there is the starlet headlining which is fantastic relaxing and endlessly fascinating at least for imagine time i've had the car occasionally if you're lucky as well you will spot a shooting star hairing across like that there's one oh i forgot the carpets they are well they're a little thing in a way really but so sumptuous i mean short of actually getting a sheep in here they couldn't be more woolly if they tried you feel like you'd lose your shoes in them anyway for all that there are very obvious traits of luxury in here it's actually the subtler things the things that you can't see the things that they've done behind the scenes that intrigue me even more about the ghost and much of that unseen engineering is to do with achieving as simon and garfunkel might say the sound of silence it is so quiet in here that you can quite literally hear a pin drop actually louder than i expected who knew pins made such a racket rolls royce when they were developing this actually toyed with the idea of having a completely silent cabin and then decided that that was too spooky so they engineered in the fact that this would have just a very subtle whisper a single note so they tuned the entire cabin to resonate at this one note in order to achieve this near silence they looked at things like the boot so it was a rather cavernous 500 liters back there and there was an occasional boom so they put some piping in to relieve the air pressure equalize it between there and the cabin the seats too were creating a resonance because obviously there are large waist and a lot of it is up high so they added a mass damper also we talked about those with the wishbones well mass dampers appear in here too just to take out the sound of the seats and of course because it's so near silent in here it means you can hear music better when you want to play it and the audio system is the best i have ever heard there's no brand name so there's no bang olufsen or bars and wilkins or name it just says bespoke audio and again it's the technology that you can't see that are obviously the speakers here but these sills have been turned into giant subwoofers and rather than just having the cone speakers they've also used little exciter speakers which effectively turned the entirety of this ceiling into one big speaker the result is extraordinary it's pointlessly trying to get it over on film because we couldn't really capture it adequately but it's like having your favorite artist sitting in the back seat with you or being able to hear every single instrument in the orchestra some that you probably didn't even realize existed in the tracks you've listened to for ages the rest of the infotainment system will be recognizable to anyone that has spent time in a bmw but this is no bad thing and it's somehow done slightly more subtly than when the vw group shares bits across its brands there's obviously apple carplay too and while the technology might be familiar it is framed by a cabin that has a level of detail and luxury that is a cut above almost anything else from this car's open pore wall nut to the of the metal vents to the smooth action of their organ stock controls to the way the 850 twinkling stars appear as if by magic on the beautifully illuminated fascia even simple things add to the ambience like the fan controls being labeled with soft medium and high rather than just being illustrated by a bar chart or numbered it's like saying i don't know cops instead of turn nine at silverstone or parabolica instead of turn 11 at monza it's descriptive it's just it oozes quality actually whilst we're talking about the hvac if i just turn this from soft all the way up to max and then if i pull this organ stop out here and here normally when i do these pieces of camera we have to turn all the air conditioning off basically so it gets quite hot in the cars because it's much too loud this is on max and it's barely above a whisper in here from the polished air conditioning ducts to the nano fleece filter that removes contaminants from the cabin's micro environment the rolls-royce ghost ensures that its occupants exist in rarefied air and although starting at just a quarter of a million pounds this is in some ways the baby of the range it certainly never felt like a lesser role to me certainly not in terms of its size when i was behind the wheel nor in terms of its serenity level of luxury or engineering it really is supernaturally good [Music] you

Channel: Carfection

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Id: spq0QbFUna4

Length: 14min 16sec (856 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/michaelalex3]

Love the design of this car, it looks like a RR without being too ostentatious (like the Phantom).

[u/praguer56]

The back looks a lot like the old Rover 75.

[u/tilouswag]

Man this thing FLOATS over bumps.