The first thing I was put straight on about the new Rolls Royce Wraith is that it is not in any car sector.
“The people who buy our cars do not usually consider us against any other cars. It is a simple luxury purchase and may be up against an investment in a ski chalet, a small aircraft or a luxury yacht. “What about Bentley?” “Bentley is a very different car.”
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The second misconception was that the Rolls would be a roller, a sloppy old thing that wallows into corners and waddles out. Not so.
The third thing was that it would not be a satisfactory performance car. It would accelerate at the rate of a milk float and brake like a snow sledge with pilot trailing a foot.
It has been 30 years since last I drove a Rolls – a Silver Shadow kindly loaned to me by the local dealer Evans Halshaw in Birmingham. I wrote then that it was a sloppy old thing with little to commend it to the enthusiastic driver. Nor was the living room particularly impressive. It was insufficient in conveying the sense of sitting somewhere special.
The principal of Evans Halshaw rang my editor, complained about my judgement and reminded him that EH was a substantial advertiser. The fact that EH had allowed me to use it to convey my bride to our wedding was a further fizzer in the fire.
So it was with some trepidation that I committed to a trip to Vienna and a jaunt through the local countryside in the new Wraith. Would I dislike the car so much that I would feel obliged to say so?
Jaunt it was not. This thing leaps off the line like a jet fighter and hurtles through bends with the stability of the finest luxury saloons. It does so with perfect poise and with a very satisfactory ascending growl. Under BMW’s ownership, the Wraith has become a very successful performance saloon which can and will be admired by the wedged-up buyers of vehicles currently considered to fulfil that role.
The spec of the car I drove meant that it carried a price tag of a little over GBP360,000. You could deal at GBP245,000 if you were having to wait for your ship to come in to buy the best. For the same money you could have a fleet of 10 to 15 BMW 3 Series. So to justify that, the prospective owner must discover some unexpected delights.
He can. Take for example the little button that opens or closes the door for you. There is none of this leaning out of the car to catch hold of the door-pull. Or the umbrella that resides in the front wing and can be extracted through the door frame before you step out into the rain Or the hundreds of little twinkly star-lights in the headlining (“just GBP30K for that Sir”,) which cast a warm glow on the occupants as the conveyance glides through the dark of the night. In Japan the colloquial for RR is not Rolls-Royce but Rock&Roll.
The Wraith is impossible to classify or to compare with other cars. But if it were, it would – for my money – have reached the top.
