Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit II Review - Is it worth the risk? - BEARDS n CARS

very special thanks once again to affordable prestige cars in glastonbury as i've said before it's always a pleasure to work with them especially on a car like this and of course if you want to check out their current stock or chat to them about potentially buying an affordable luxury car of course check out the link down in the description which takes you over to their website [Music] [Music] when reviewing something like classic rolls-royce or a bentley of the time or even something more modern like a maybach you can't really review these cars under the same parameters typically as a more normal or even high performance modern car would be for obvious reasons and maybe some reasons that aren't quite as obvious now my angle for this review is going to be looking at it from the perspective of an outsider and what i mean by that is actually very simple if you are already a rolls royce aficionado if you are in the market to buy another one then let's be honest chances are you're not watching this video in the first place because you already know what you're talking about you know what to look out for and you know what you want that means that this review is appealing to somebody different and that is my angle somebody who maybe isn't a rolls royce super fan maybe you've never even considered owning a rolls royce before but now that you've noticed the prices at least at the current time maybe you're curious because for a while and occasionally still you will see a rolls royce for about five or six grand not this model but some others and it could be tempting i was certainly tempted myself but you kind of think well what if it breaks it's a rolls do you have to get some specialist can only rolls royce work on it is the engine sealed and locked with a padlock is it this dangerous decision to make well yes and no i'm not going to sugarcoat it if the car does break yes it will be expensive but the car actually reminds me a lot of a maserati my maserati for instance was much newer than this and a totally different kind of car the only thing it had in common was that it was also affordable but the point remains that you should only buy something like a maserati if you are all in you have to love the company love the car really be willing to put the time effort swept tears and crucially cash into keeping that vehicle as you would want it to be and you need to be prepared to have a little bit of a buffer to pay for repairs because it's not a matter of if it's a matter of when now what i will say in favor of this rolls royce which is of course as you saw from the title of the video a silver spirit 2 and i'm going to get into some of the specifics of that model and how it differs from others as well this is not anywhere near as unreliable as a maserati because it was made to be better to begin with in fact these engines a 6.75 liter v8 are good for about half a million miles at least if they're cared for and that's the crucial difference see a maserati could be treated like a king and it's still gonna break with a rolls-royce it's kind of a respect based relationship it will last if it's treated well and if it's cared for if you keep the car in good condition then it will simply last longer this one for instance you can feel it's been loved the performance still feels like it's brand new just rolled off the lot it doesn't feel like it's you know creaking excessively or has splits in the seats or suspension that's a little bit patchy brakes that work when they feel like it now i'm gonna talk about some of those things which of course to somebody who doesn't drive classics all the time will be a little bit jarring when you first get in the car me for instance i tend to focus in on newer vehicles mostly not classics so when i got into this car it took me a good probably 15 to 20 minutes to get used to the suspension alone and the reason why is because well it does feel like a boat by today's standards you grasp the thin rim massive steering wheel and kind of turn it roughly in the direction that you want to go and the car begins to think about joining you on that journey at some point in the near future you press the brake which feels like a massive industrial set of bellows that's stoked in a fire somewhere under the bonnet and it's not so much a braking system as more of a kind of a male unit which sends a signed and sealed letter of intent to somewhere down in the engine bay it's telling them that you plan sometime within the next month to dock with dry land and then the car will consider acquiescing to your request so in other words plan ahead you need to turn before you need to brake well before you need to and even when it comes to the quote-unquote performance that this car has well i will say it's quicker than you'd probably think but it's no performance car because of course it wasn't designed to be however it is quicker than you might think and one of the reasons why is because it actually shares more in common with a bentley than you might usually think of a rolls-royce as being see rolls-royce and bentley have always had this give-and-take sort of relationship with rolls-royce being the pure luxury brand for the most part less so in recent years with stuff like the wraith and bentley of course being the more motorsport and performance arm of that luxury typically though when you go for a rolls-royce it is distinctly rolls-royce it looks kind of like a bentley but it's distinctly not a bentley this generation though has always kind of i'll be honest put me off a little bit because it looks so similar to a bentley and you kind of think well the rolls-royce i get it but bentley has the turbo r which is more powerful and faster even a similar era similar price and the reason why is because they're based on the same platform so it kind of is the bentley and the bentley is this that is an interesting question that you need to answer for yourself though i of course can't tell you whether or not you should buy the rolls or the bentley but this generation of those two cars is probably where that question has the most significance these days you know buying a rolls-royce wraith is a very different option to buying a bentley continental gt back in this generation it's a little bit more gray now to get back into that performance that 6.75 liter v8 certainly not lacking for size the earlier models were carbareta later had the same bosch fuel injection system that the bentley turbo r has puts out about 210 to 230 horsepower which is not bad you know peak powers at 4300 rpm so it's pretty lazy which i like the torque is reasonably good between 300 and 350 pound feet depending on the model year and who you ask frankly and even the weight varies quite a bit from online specs anything from 2.25 tonnes to 2.4 so let's say it's around the 2.3 2.4 tonne region in terms of using one on a daily basis well let's be honest most people probably want but if you chose to is that a viable option well the suspension is still very comfortable the the steering itself as i said is fairly wallowy but it is very comfortable in a straight line which is what the car really wants to do it just soaks up all the bumps in the road and the reason why is pretty obvious it has a hydro pneumatic self-leveling suspension system with gas charged shocks as well it's designed to be comfortable it's a roll so it does that very well probably better than anything else in fact in terms of daily costs though well of course the most noticeable thing is going to be the fuel it's not as bad as you might think in terms of range because the tank is fairly big but the miles per gallon of course isn't that great it is basically a classic after all so you're looking at about 13 to the gallon generally speaking it's a 24 uk gallon tank that's 107 liters which means you can get about 300 310 miles out of it that's not bad but of course it's not going to be cheap to fill up every time over and over again if you do choose to use it as a commuter and that brings me to another crucial crossroads in this review see i believe there are two primary groups of people who should consider buying this rolls royce or one like it either you are already a rolls royce fan maybe an aficionado maybe even a previous owner maybe slightly older you like going on cruises with them taking them to shows or just using it on the weekend and possibly even having one as a project car that is a distinct group and i would say probably the majority of owners and potential buyers fall under that category the second group is interesting because the second group tends to be the people who don't buy one but consider one and i would put myself even into this category because i did consider for a fleeting moment getting one of those cheaper rolls-royces now ultimately of course i didn't but who knows about the future that second group i would wager is generally a little bit younger maybe 20s 30s sometimes beyond but you actually do want to think about whether you could use it every day maybe even retrofit some components to make it more modern and i actually believe as sacrilegious as it sounds that's not a bad idea when it comes to this car in a very similar way actually to my review of the mercedes ml55 it's a large high-performance suv and it's one which you can very quickly feel would do great things with modern components stiffer springs better brakes for instance to me the rolls-royce feels exactly the same this feels like a car which was technically kind of foolproof for the future a vehicle which was better than its time they made it as good as they could with the components that they had to work with but the raw vehicle underneath those components has more potential than the time allowed it to have and that to me is crucial to potentially using one more often than just as a weekend toy if you were to take this car remove the entire hydro pneumatic suspension system maybe put it on a modernized airbag system from you know a donor car for example or even like a sport suspension system if you wanted more performance it will immediately change the characteristics of the car and not necessarily in a bad way see if that hydro pneumatic system breaks of course it is a technical component of the car so it's going to be specialized and it is going to be expensive in terms of stuff that's less expensive to fix though the gearbox for example it's a gm sourced part it's actually one of the most affordable things to replace on the rolls royce and it's a pretty good system initially a three speed later a four-speed of course automatic and is column change which i personally love in the states i know loads of you guys have column change cars but in the uk it's a little bit rarer and i find it a lot of fun actually to use a column shifter to get back to my point on retrofitting the car though i believe that the suspension and the brakes would make a world of difference to a car like this having it operated to discs all around with more powerful calipers you would immediately change the entire personality of the car except you wouldn't sacrifice what makes it good in the first place which is the comfort and the presence and the pedigree and also how well-built that engine is being able to go for half a million miles regularly if the engine is taken care of is a testament to how well they were made it is the rolls royce of cars and that statement exists for a reason so it is a car which is difficult to pinpoint i would say an exact ideal buyer for but i think that rolls royce's classic ones especially do have a wider audience than you might think i think the problem is that many of those people who might be a potential buyer who may love the car and use it more than they might ever imagine to i think they might not even consider it and that's the problem see the obvious choice would be for instance like an oil sheik who wants to import them or a classic british owner who wants to use it on the weekend as i said but i think there's this pocket of people usually in a younger age range who might actually enjoy the car a lot more than they think they would me for example generally speaking i've reviewed more modern cars and most of the classic cars that i love because i am a huge classic car fan they do tend to be performance oriented this though was one of those occasions where the longer i drove the car the more i wanted to drive it because after the initial culture shock if you will of getting used to that time periods aesthetics and physics and how the car wallows around and kind of decides if it wants to cooperate with steering and brakes it does once you get used to that feel like a pretty great experience it has a lot of presence on the road the space as you can kind of see is pretty massive you look out over the bonnet which is big enough to play polo on and you feel like you do dominate the road even when it comes to interior space of course it has a lot more rear space than a modern limo or sedan would because many of them tend to have more aerodynamic shapes now whereas this was essentially like a big box in terms of its shape and its design a good looking box but old-fashioned aerodynamics for the most part so in the back the headroom is great of course most of the owners are going to be sitting back there back in the day and having a chauffeur up front but even up front there is so much space the only thing that i will slightly criticize is the headroom isn't quite as good as you might think you can kind of see that in the video my head is very close to the roof and although the seat is adjustable it can only move so much in terms of legroom and with room though well it's got that for days in fact if you have a small pet or a child who goes down into the foot well to retrieve something say your last goodbyes because you'll probably never see them again it's a massive car inside now if you are in the market to buy one and you're curious what you need to look out for there tends to be a couple of consistent things that you can notice about the car as to whether or not it's had a good life or maybe some neglect service history is always a great example if there are large and especially recent gaps that's not usually a good sign and you could say that about a lot of cars but when it's something like this of course you'll want to take note of that that hydropneumatic suspension system it's something which will be costly so make sure that it works properly make sure it feels good when you drive it that it doesn't have some kind of shallow spots or seem to be in and out of operation and even stuff like pumping the brake pedal a few times seeing how it feels and this is the kind of stuff of course that you can look on owners forums and classic and sports car mag and check out for yourself as well as well as of course checking out the obvious stuff like body rust or any leaks under the car if it's been sitting for a while the usual stuff really that you would look for on any car but of course when something like this breaks it will naturally cost more and be more complex to repair than a normal vehicle would even of its time so again just like the maserati statement that i made earlier it's the kind of car that you shouldn't buy just for the sake of it you should buy if you really want to have that ownership experience not necessarily just specifically in roles but something of that caliber something that you want to experience maybe use every day maybe not but you have to be all in if you have for instance sixteen thousand pounds to buy the car then don't buy the car if you want a sixteen thousand pound rolls royce have eighteen nineteen twenty thousand and then buy it because at least then you have a buffer it might never cost you that much it might not cost you anything to fix because it may not even break but if it does you need to have that safety net there because it can make all the difference between never wanting to see the car again if it breaks and wanting to get rid of it and just forget it or just getting on with it getting it fixed and enjoying it again so it really depends on what you want from the car how much you plan to use it and if you want to be all in on that kind of vehicle experience my verdict is then it's definitely a car with a lot to offer even by today's standards it has potential to be retrofitted and improved even more than it was back then in my opinion but you just have to be 100 sure that you want to take that plunge and as i've said with a couple of other vehicles some more than others it is a calculated risk so you have to decide is the answer to that calculation worth the risk to you personally but overall if you are new to the channel of course click here on screen to see my other reviews both for cars and motorcycles and if you want to keep up with my newer vids including of course more car reviews slap not only the subscription box but also the notification bell so that you actually see my new vids as soon as they're released but for now as always thanks for watching

Channel: HSG Automotive

Views: 14,453

Rating: 4.8742137 out of 5

Keywords: hsg, hsg automotive, rolls royce, rolls royce silver spirit ii, silver spirit 2, rolls royce buying guide, rolls royce review, road test review, test drive review, bentley turbo r, beards and cars, top gear rolls royce, doug demuro, scotty kilmer, common problems, common issues, rolls royce silver spirit review, rolls phantom, rolls wraith, maybach, bentley eight, rolls silver spirit, rolls silver shadow, rolls cullinan, bentley vs rolls, horizon 4 bentley turbo r, drag, vs

Id: iaQp4JtBeg8

Length: 17min 6sec (1026 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 17 2020