Every now and again, something hits my driveway that absolutely stumps me. It can be tricky enough to come up with something to write about the fifth Hyundai Sonata or third Jeep Wrangler I’ve driven in the space of 18 months, but something like the 2022 Rolls-Royce Ghost Black Badge presents a very different conundrum: What can I possibly say to the person who has a half million dollars to spend on their next ride?
I rounded up there but not by much. Before tax, tags and your driver’s salary, this Ghost checks in at $484,950. Of that, $43,850 goes to Black Badge, which, when boiled down to its purest essence, is an enthusiast’s equipment package with some rather dramatic aesthetic components. Rolls-Royce’s reputation is that of a builder of cars meant to be driven in rather than driven, but Ghost is the de facto “driver’s” four-door in the lineup, and Black Badge is as close to an antidote to that cliché as you’ll find in the company’s portfolio.
While it is a performance model, Black Badge doesn’t completely blow the doors off the Ghost’s already-impressive baseline performance. It benefits from an additional 29 horsepower and 57 pound-feet of torque (for a total of 583 hp and 663 lb-ft, respectively) and retuned air springs that “alleviate body roll under more assertive cornering.” The brakes were also tweaked for more immediate response and shorter pedal travel, but the clamps themselves are identical to a standard Ghost’s.
Put another way, Black Badge is a performance package that happens to cost more than some performance cars. Welcome to tier 0 of car ownership. That’s a hollow greeting, of course. Rolls-Royce sold a grand total of 5,586 (ahem) motor cars in 2021, and not one of them is among my permanent collection. You’re shocked, I know. Statistically, we’re quite likely to be in the same boat. I’m living vicariously through the Rolls-Royce marketing budget and you’re living vicariously through me. Too bad. I’m pretty boring.
So boring that the best outing I could come up with was a jaunt to a lake cottage just 30 miles or so north of Detroit proper. Given this car’s price point, you’d be forgiven for insisting that the Ghost had better be able to do just about anything one might expect from modern four-wheeled transportation, but realistically, the person who can afford to be chauffeured in a Black Badge can likely call on other forms of transit should the weather take a turn for the worse.
Since I’m not one of those people, I had to take into consideration the broader consequences of potentially getting a half-million-dollar car stuck in the snow. And snow it did, the night before the Ghost’s scheduled arrival, no less. In my own car, getting buried axles-deep would be but a mild inconvenience. Here, it’s something that could easily consume an entire weekend (or more) and make Rolls-Royce less inclined to let Autoblog sample its wares. You know, no pressure.
But due in no small part to Rolls-Royce’s foresight, it turned out that I really needn’t be worried despite nearly a foot of fresh snow falling in some parts of the norther ‘burbs. Bolstering the Ghost’s standard all-wheel drive was a set of winter wheels and tires replacing the ostentatious carbon-fiber wheels that are normally fitted to a Black Badge. And as more than a few cocky SUV and truck owners learned, this combo was more than a match for rural Michigan’s finest ruts and gravel.
@autoblog “Shooting Star” LED headliner in the 2022 Rolls-Royce Ghost Black Badge 🤩✨ #rollsroyce #luxury #ghost ♬ Infinite – Tarik
After exiting the highway, the route to the cottage alternates over paved and unpaved roads. While the asphalt surfaces showed significant melt by the time I made my way north, the dirt and gravel sections were virtually ungroomed apart from the tracks of other adventurous wanderers. This was enough to guarantee the Ghost’s front end wouldn’t be plowing snow along the way, but its big, long belly often rustled against larger drifts as it freight-trained through the snowy woods.
The Ghost is long and heavy but it proved surprisingly nimble and sure-footed even on these snow-packed surfaces. F-150s and Grand Cherokees would appear in my mirrors as the road straightened only to vanish at every turn. They’d re-appear later, obviously attempting to keep pace. Later, a group of teenagers in a side-by-side adorned with snow shovels stalked the Ghost through a lakeside neighborhood, likely hoping to extract a Rolls-Royce-sized bounty should I find myself in too deep. They eventually got bored and turned around.
It was on this path that I occasionally caught the faintest wisp of what it must be like to own a Rolls-Royce — to waft from one home to another over some disused and remote country lane, unimpeded by humanity or nature, isolated and coddled by lambswool and leather, and surrounded by surfaces with more layers of lacquer on them than I can count. These fleeting glimpses were few and far between, and as close to the real experience as I ever expect my life to take me.
While the notion of a lake cottage may smack of wealth and privilege, this is Michigan, where they practically hand you a plot of waterfront land when you get your driver’s license. The homes along this particular lake are on the modest side and due to their proximity to metro Detroit, Ann Arbor, Pontiac and Flint, many are occupied year-round. Out of curiosity, I pulled up Zillow. Sure enough, for the list price of the Black Badge, I could have had my pick of about a half-dozen homes along those shores — some of them not much larger than the Ghost, I might add. It barely fit into the cottage’s driveway; the two-car garage was a complete non-starter.
Believe me, it’s as evident to me as it is to any of you that a vehicle like this requires care and feeding well above and beyond what I’m capable of offering, and I don’t just mean the baseline financial commitment. The things you and I take for granted get turned completely on their heads when a Ghost steps in for a Golf. “Can I find parking at the grocery store?” instead becomes, “Can I find parking at the grocery store that won’t virtually guarantee a six-figure insurance claim after Molly Midwest’s rug rats bash the door in?” Shake Shack doesn’t valet, you know.
I’m not opposed to having cars reserved for special occasions — I own two “treat” cars of my own — but even if I could snap my fingers and make a Ghost appear in my driveway free and clear, it would so warp the rest of my life around it that it would cease to be a “car” in the way I define one. The concern I feel for the cars I normally drive would be replaced by consternation. I wouldn’t own a Ghost, it would own me — consuming my life just as greedily as it consumed my weekend. And that brings me back to my dilemma: Whose purchasing decision could I possibly expect to inform with my experience?
I pondered that very question on a chilly February night as I reclined in the rear of the Ghost, closed in with the engine off. In the darkness, the LEDs embedded in the headliner put on a show, casting errant meteorites across a vast, handcrafted star field. I lingered, considering what it might be like to ease my head back after a long day and simply look up at those delicate pinpricks of light and forget everything that brought me to that moment. Each one of those lights was like a tiny window into a world I’ll never know — beautiful, different and forever out of reach. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.
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Keyword: 2022 Rolls-Royce Ghost Black Badge | Ecstasy in the shadows