The man charged with reinventing the best-selling Rolls-Royce of all time admits the new Ghost is not the best ever…
The day we meet Jon Simms, the vehicle project leader for the second-generation Rolls-Royce Ghost, he’s not sitting behind a large oak desk in a glass-walled office with views over the British countryside.
That’s not the straight-talking Brit’s style, so instead over Zoom at 7:30am just days before the Ghost’s launch, we find Simms in his workshop, complete with an engineering development ‘mule’ under wraps parked behind him.
For the past five years, Simms and his team have lived and breathed Ghost but the pressure of replacing the most successful Rolls-Royce in the hallowed luxury car-maker’s 116-year history doesn’t show.
While I’m mainlining espresso, Simms is bright and cheerful, but clearly very bloody busy, and we have just 30 minutes and not one, but two minders on the call to make sure he doesn’t slip up.
Laidback Simms doesn’t seem to mind. He seems relieved to be at the end of what could be his most ambitious project yet – even after the launch of the controversial Cullinan SUV.
When asked what was the biggest challenge of replacing the Ghost, Simms explains it was the customer or, more accurately, customers’ reluctance to accept any change to the car they love.
“Last week I was with a guy with a Ghost that had had it for eight years and was struggling to work out what to replace it with,” he says.
“We’ve had this very difficult dance between bringing an improved product to market while at the same time not touching anything that owner’s love.”
Despite the reluctance among Rolls-Royce’s rich clientele to accept change, change has come.
The new Ghost is just that – all-new from the ground up, from its all-aluminium spaceframe chassis to the fact it switches from rear- to all-wheel drive and embraces new technology like newfangled rear-wheel steer, active anti-roll tech and a suspension system that scans the road ahead for bumps and imperfections.
Perhaps the second biggest challenge, Simms admits, is meeting the needs of the diverse range of buyers who bought the original Ghost.
“In the US, Australian and Euro markets the vehicles are used completely differently to the Asian markets and you have this real spectrum of people who use a Rolls-Royce more formally to people who like the fact it can be an everyday vehicle,” he says.
“The development process of this car, and I’ve been involved in the last two vehicles, has been the most difficult.”
Simms is referring to how us Australians prefer to drive our Ghosts, rather than be driven in them.
This is a particular headache for an engineer because as well as making it as comfortable and cossetting as possible, it must also be a decent driver’s car.
These two goals are not necessarily mutually exclusive, with Simms pointing to the fact that the latest Ghost migrates from its BMW-derived platform to the British marque’s own all-aluminium spaceframe chassis that underpins both the flagship Phantom and Cullinan.
Not only is the platform stiffer and more rigid, the modular ‘Architecture of Luxury’ allowed the Rolls-Royce team to introduce the latest technology to the car-maker’s entry model.
That said, even with the new architecture, the challenges still stacked up.
“People think chasing a stiff body structure is the holy grail of engineering a car,” says Simms,
“But, actually, if you have a stiff body structure without developing a decent suspension system you achieve an awkward blend of a racecar and a road car that just feels horrible.”
Developing the suspension system is the job Simms says he relished, claiming that there’s no substitute for hundreds of hours behind the wheel.
“There really is no clever answer to developing suspension systems, just hours in the seat. There were many days we’d drive 14 to 15 hours at a time across Europe, swapping from front to rear seat, sharing the driving with other engineers. We’d stop, make an adjustment and carry on.”
Despite claiming there was no silver bullet involved with the Ghost’s creation, the British engineering team based in Goodwood did have a moment of sheer inspiration when it came up with an elegant mechanical solution to radically improve ride comfort that involved bolting another C-shaped lever to the upper wishbone on the suspension.
In layman terms, the additional damped wishbone takes energy away from the body without any of the nasty knocking NVH (noise, vibration and harshness) issues traditional hydraulic bump-stops add.
Describing it as a “beautiful moment”, Simms said this single act of inspiration came quickly but then took a further three-to-four months of exhaustive testing before it was signed off.
Lavishing that amount of time on something as novel as the planar device is becoming rarer and rarer as global auto-makers face financial constraints on the time spent developing a model, even one as expensive as a Rolls -Royce.
But Simms thinks spending the time calibrating remains the only way to properly develop new Roller.
Helping matters was the fact that most of the embedded tech in the Ghost has already been used on other models, but Simms insists there were still no shortcuts.
Admitting that the Phantom itself was one of the key benchmarks used to develop the Ghost, Simms wouldn’t be drawn on some of the other vehicles that may, or may not, have influenced the Ghost.
“I consider myself a dyed-in-the-wool car enthusiast and engineer but I’m always reluctant to use the term ‘benchmark’ because it sounds like you’re trying to reach something or compare yourself against something,” he says.
“The Ghost is a very different proposition. The reason we compared it with other cars was to ensure that our product has a clear personality and it matches what our clients expect from it.”
Interestingly, when it comes to the tech incorporated, Simms was careful about what made the grade.
An example he gives is with the rear seat entertainment.
“There’s some incredibly fancy, incredibly flashy removable tablets out there but what we found when speaking to clients is those system don’t get used very often,” he says.
His biggest bugbear, though, is reserved for modern ‘state-of-the-art’ large all-encompassing infotainment screens.
“A lot of other manufacturers are moving towards almost a complete deletion of buttons in a vehicle, but if you’ve used a modern Range Rover or Volvo you have to scroll through two menus just to change the temperature!” he says.
“(With our car) you start with one button, barely take your hand off the wheel to engage drive, without even looking you can reach out and put your hand on an analogue temperature dial where you instinctively know that clockwise is hotter and anti-clockwise is cooler and then you drive off. That’s effortless.”
Describing modern digital instrument cluster as “just pixels”, Simms says he’s proud of how his team of designers and engineers blend digital dials with analogue clusters and wrap it all up in a premium feel.
One controversial element of the new Rolls-Royce Ghost is the proud claim that it incorporates an astonishing 100kg of sound-deadening material.
Extra weight is the arch nemesis of any engineer, so when I asked the Rolls-Royce project leader whether or not it was worth the sacrifice, he notes that even with the new all-wheel-drive hardware, trick suspension tech and overall bigger proportions, the latest Ghost is on par weight-wise with the previous model.
That means weight was saved elsewhere, with Simms pointing to the aluminium chassis which offsets the 100kg increase and helps ensure the vehicle is as quiet as physically possible.
It’s the last question that finally stumps Simms, when I ask if the result of all his long days and early mornings has created the best Rolls-Royce ever made.
“With its lower centre of gravity, all-wheel drive and the 6.75-litre (twin-turbo V12), the Ghost’s blend of abilities is better than any other Rolls-Royce, certainly.”
But is it the best ever?
Simms hesitates before answering.
“I still spend many hours driving the Phantom and when you get one, when you climb into the back seat it still has that edge,” he says.
“There’s a presence, a level of isolation by virtue of its size – it’s unrivalled – if that’s your goal, the Phantom is the best Rolls-Royce there is.”
Keyword: Ghost Story: The engineer behind the all-new Rolls-Royce Ghost