Rolls-Royce will “never” build a small car
It kind of makes sense when you think about it. Rolls-Royce buyers typically have a fair few cars, and, ostensibly, somewhere to park them.
At the 2015 Frankfurt motor show CarAdvice spoke with Giles Taylor, Rolls-Royce Cars director of design, who made it clear that there’s no space for a small Roller in the ranks. For reference, the Wraith four-seat, two-door coupe measures 5269 millimetres long, and the larger five-seat, four-door Phantom sedan spans 5842mm long.
“Do you mean smaller than [Wraith and Dawn]? No,” he said, of the chances of a smaller sedan or two-door coupe/drophead convertible.
“I can honestly say, because normally when that kind of question comes to me, there’s a little bit of a flick of an eyebrow that says – ah, you are!,” he said.
“But no. Never. We don't need to,” Taylor asserted.
“We’re exclusive, we’re not chasing volume, we’ve got product coming through in the name of the SUV, finally, for our little highly crafted factory in Goodwood that's going to be enough. That’ll keep us busy.
“These cars will leave the factory about 300,000 euros, and if we do 1000 a year, we’re making a very, very substantial profit.
“So we don’t need to go and downsize. And if you say ‘are there socio-economic trends?’, [we’d answer] not really,” he said.
“Small Rolls-Royces don’t exist.”
Rolls-Royce Cars product communications manager James Warren elaborated on the notion of only offering sizeable cars.
“There cannot be compromise. The ultimate in comfort and luxury, it’s as simple as that. And luxury is space,” Warren said.
“There’s no trick you can pull, there’s no piece of engineering you can pull that makes up for a lack of legroom, for instance.
“It’s proportions, it’s the look. And remember our customers have seven or eight cars. There’s space in the garage for something like that.”
0
