The Dawn has reached the end of its era as Rolls-Royce Motor Cars sunsets this glamorous convertible. As the luxury marque’s best-selling drophead in its history, the Dawn holds great significance to the company.
Following the success of Phantom VII, and its stablemates the Phantom Coupé and Phantom Drophead Coupé, an increasingly youthful, universally self-confident and sociable client base was drawn to the Rolls-Royce brand. These new super-luxury consumers required a motor car that, like the first transformative models of Rolls-Royce’s Goodwood era, captured the glamour and romance of super-luxury motoring; but did so in a fashion completely in tune with their contemporary tastes and lifestyles.
It dawned on Rolls-Royce that there was space in the marque’s product portfolio to fulfil these particular clients’ desires. Accordingly, Rolls-Royce CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös challenged his designers to create not just a stablemate to Phantom Drophead Coupé, but an entirely new kind of super-luxury convertible. More than simply a beautiful motor car, it should evoke the romance and glamour that informs so much of Rolls-Royce’s legend, and offers a social, approachable and contemporary expression of open-top touring to an ascendant new generation.
Three years earlier, Rolls-Royce had launched its fastback coupé Wraith, but the idea of repurposing it was never considered. Instead, the marque’s designers found inspiration much earlier in the company’s vast and storied history.
Between 1950 and 1954, Rolls-Royce made just 28 examples of the Silver Dawn drophead coupé. The Dawn nameplate, with its connotations of new beginnings, fresh opportunities and glorious vistas, was unanimously approved as the perfect candidate for a 21st century reincarnation.
The pure, simple form of Dawn was inspired by fifties and sixties fashion which evoked glamour by removing superfluous lines and textures, focusing instead on how it amplified the form of the wearer. Similarly, Dawn’s supple, flowing coachwork wraps around its occupants akin to raising a collar on an overcoat, affording those inside a cossetting, private and chic cabin experience.
In creating Dawn, 80% of the panels were entirely unique, including a ‘wake channel’ on the bonnet emanating from the Spirit of Ecstasy, evoking the sensation of quietly gathering energy while provisioning drivers with a permanent vanishing point – a design feature that endures on Rolls-Royce motor cars today. However, in one vital respect, Dawn broke with a long-established automotive design convention.
Almost without exception, convertibles are designed in a 2+2 configuration, with full-size seating for the driver and one passenger in the front, plus 2 smaller seats for occasional passengers or children in the rear. The lack of rear-seat space, and particularly legroom, reduces the car’s comfort and practicality – a shortcoming Rolls-Royce refused to accept. Dawn was therefore a full 4-seater with comfortable, individual seating for all occupants.
The simplicity of Dawn’s design in actuality belied a host of complex engineering challenges. Most notably was the intricate roof mechanism, dubbed the ‘Silent Ballet’ for its precision, elegance and noiseless operation. A convertible hardtop had been briefly considered but the marque’s designers decided Dawn’s roof should be created from fabric to retain the romance of listening to rain drops on canvas. Thus with a unique blend of materials that included fabric, cashmere and high-performance acoustic composites, Dawn was the world’s quietest convertible. With its roof closed, Dawn equalled the Rolls-Royce Wraith for noise-isolating performance.
Rolls-Royce engineers spent months optimising the convertible experience with an exhaustive testing programme – neither eliminating airflow completely nor permitting disruptive levels into the cabin. To achieve this, the test subject was a modified mannequin provisioned with a wig of long, flowing hair. It was chauffeured for hundreds of hours while a bank of sensors and cameras faithfully recorded how the hair was displaced by the moving air. The resulting data enabled engineers to make Dawn the world leader in aerodynamic comfort with the roof open.
Rolls-Royce also recognised the centrality of the driving experience for many of the younger clients it was creating a motor car for. Thus, beneath its svelte lines, Dawn got the marque’s near-silent 6.6L twin-turbo V12 engine with 563 bhp. The chassis, naturally, delivered the brand’s signature ‘Magic Carpet Ride’, combining responsiveness and engagement with an almost supernatural smoothness.
Incidentally, during a product experience later in Dawn’s life, an American journalist passed through an area as it was struck by an earthquake measuring 3.6 on the Richter scale, followed by a 2.7 aftershock; such was the smoothness of the ride, he learned of this only when he read about it in the press the following morning.
In 2017, Rolls-Royce added a Black Badge variant of Dawn to its model family. Like the Ghost and Wraith that preceded it, Dawn’s rebellious alter ego derived its character from a series of engineering and design treatments. An entirely new exhaust system added a bass baritone quality to the engine note; with the engine tuned to deliver an extra 30 bhp and boosted torque to 840 Nm.
Beyond its desirability, Dawn brought the spirit of ‘la dolce vita’ (the sweet life) to Rolls-Royce’s contemporary brand promise through an exquisite marriage of seductive design, contemporary materials, and a social, open-air driving experience. In doing so, Dawn had ensured its legacy by captivating an entirely new generation to the marque.
Keyword: Rolls-Royce Dawn Heads Into The Sunset