the white house thinks rolls royce builds car engines in americaThe Trump administration spent last week trumpeting a wave of automaker commitments it says amount to "rebuilding the American auto industry." New plants, new jobs, retooled facilities. One of the headline items, however, has nothing to do with cars at all.the white house thinks rolls royce builds car engines in americaA White House news release dated Aug. 19 credits Rolls-Royce with nearly $100 million in U.S. investment. The figures break down to $75 million to expand engine production in South Carolina and a recently completed $24 million expansion in Minnesota.The problem: None of it involves high-priced luxury cars.AdvertisementAdvertisementRolls-Royce Motor Cars, the outfit that builds the Cullinan, Ghost, and Phantom, does not make engines in South Carolina. Its 6.75-liter V12 comes from parent company BMW, assembled at Hams Hall in the UK. The Aiken, South Carolina, and Mankato, Minnesota, operations belong to a completely different Rolls-Royce.the white house thinks rolls royce builds car engines in americaThose plants build diesel engines and generator sets. The Aiken facility produces Mtu Series 4000 engines, which then head to Mankato to be assembled into generators, the kind of critical backup power that data centers and similar sites are currently desperate for. No automotive application anywhere in the chain.If confusing Rolls-Royce for Rolls-Royce sounds like an amateur mistake, it's an expensive one with a precedent. Volkswagen spent nearly $1 billion in 1998 to buy Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, believing the package included the Rolls-Royce and Bentley brands, factories, and the badge.It didn't include the badge. The Rolls-Royce trademark belonged to Rolls-Royce plc, now Rolls-Royce Holdings plc, an aerospace and defense company that declined to sell to VW. Instead it licensed the name to BMW for roughly a 10th of what Volkswagen had paid, a mess that ended with Bentley and Rolls-Royce Motors formally splitting in 2003.the white house thinks rolls royce builds car engines in americaSo there are, effectively, several distinct entities carrying the Rolls-Royce name, and the White House release picked the wrong one.AdvertisementAdvertisementTo make matters more entertaining, the South Carolina plant isn't building aircraft engines for the nearby Boeing facility either. The Aiken operation is run by Mtu, a division of Rolls-Royce Power Systems. Mtu Solutions was founded in 1909 by Wilhelm and Karl Maybach, yes, those Maybachs, with the name short for Motoren-und Turbinen-Union.What Mtu Aiken actually builds is the Series 4000 diesel, offered in V8, V12, V16, and V20 configurations, spanning 32 to 86 liters of displacement. Output runs from 1,555 hp on the low end to nearly 6,000 hp on the high one. These engines go into ships, diesel locomotives, and even diesel submarines. None of that is going to end up under a Phantom's hood.The workers, at least, are real. The expansions add roughly 60 jobs in South Carolina and 100 in Mankato, and the folks at Hams Hall building actual V12s presumably feel fine about it too. Worth noting: the Rolls-Royce US announcements were originally made early last year, not last week.Whether you're booking a conference room or running a country, double-checking which Rolls-Royce you mean seems like a reasonable step.AdvertisementAdvertisement[Images: Rolls-Royce/Mtu, Trump/White House]Become a TTAC insider. Get the latest news, features, TTAC takes, and everything else that gets to the truth about cars first by subscribing to our newsletter.
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