Scientifically measuring the size of rain drops and studying the ancestry of highland sheep? Not your normal activities for a carmaker. But at Rolls-Royce, that’s exactly what’s going on behind closed research-department doors.
Such activities are part of the way it manages to stay ahead of the hyper-luxury pack. Not to mention justify a price-tag more psychologically aligned with three-beds-two-bathrooms than four-doors-five-seats.
Of course, Rolls-Royce has also seen itself thus, but as the competition for every customer becomes more cut-throat and the typical Rolls-Royce buyers becomes less and less typical, the brand has stepped up to offer a range of standard features that range from why-didn’t-I-think-of-that, to the truly bizarre.
Sometimes there are practical considerations at work, sometimes you get the feeling the Rolls-Royce brains trust must be having a wonderful time coming up with this stuff.
Either way, here are the latest highlights for the button-pushers and gadget freaks out there.
Rain, rain go away
The umbrella tucked away in the door of the Rolls-Royce is a lovely touch, but a bit, well, yesterday. So, the Rolls-Royce Great Idea department decided to tackle the problem of rain in a different way.
The broad idea was to tailor to drip-rail to the perfect size so that it caught rain drops effectively and channelled them away from the doors and glass, yet were small enough to keep the clean looks and reduce wind noise and aero-disturbance.
The missing part of the puzzle was how wide the drip rails needed to be to achieve this, so RR set up a project to determine the average size of the average rain drop. By scanning a range of rain from various parts of the world (by actually travelling the globe to measure them), the universal rain-drop metric was arrived at.
And that’s precisely how wide the drip rail on the current Rolls-Royce Ghost has been made. And yes, it was all researched in-house.
Waterproof sheep
That quaint term `overmats’ is luxury-car code for floor mats. Generally, they’re a way for the new-car salesman to sweeten the deal. Not these ones. The pure lambswool floor mats in the current Rolls-Royce range are all made from the wool of Scottish sheep, and Scottish sheep only.
Supporting the widely held and oft-demonstrated theory that rainwater is Scotland’s prime natural resource, the indigenous sheep have more water-repellent wool than an Aussie merino or any other breed of sheep. This gives the resulting overmats a far better ability to cope long-term with the wet brogues of the RR owner.
Starry overmast night
If you’ve been up the pointy end of an A-league airline’s A380, you might have seen the fibre-optic-studded ceiling that, when the lights are dimmed after the dinner service, recreates a starry sky. Rolls-Royce has incorporated the same technology into its latest cars as an option to a sunroof – to get around the problem of cloudy nights ruining your star-gazing pleasure, presumably.
That, in itself, is a nice touch, but RR has gone a step further by giving the LEDs a tweak to produce random shooting stars that zap across the headliner as you stare up at them from the `immersive’ (RR’s word, not ours) and massager-equipped rear seats – if you can tear your gaze away from the episode of Downton Abbey playing on the `rear theatre’ in the seat-back in front of you, that is.
Still on the headliner, Rolls-Royce also bonded magnets into the headliner, effectively turning it into a huge speaker. To make sure the fibre-optics for the stars don’t make a noise when the volume is cranked up, the fibres are all sound-damped.
Hidden ecstasy
Rolls-Royce’s famous spirit of ecstasy is well known in recent times for its ability to suddenly duck down out of sight to avoid quartering a pedestrian. But what about that character at the red light who wants to wash your windscreen? Isn’t he a candidate to interpret your car and its spotless windscreen as a personal insult? And if so, isn’t there a chance the flying lady will be the victim?
If so, you have only one course of action: instruct your driver to flip the button that sees the bonnet emblem fold away out of harm’s way. Now it’s only the traffic-light chainsaw-jugglers to deal with.
Fridgey-didge
The centre-rear armrest in the current Rolls-Royce ghost is a piece of performance art in itself with various soft-touch openings and fold-down layers. But beneath the armrest itself is an even greater prize. Not just a chilled compartment, the Ghost features an actual refrigerator that extends back and down into the boot and is good for at least a few bottles of your beverage of choice.
To prevent the embarrassment of turning up at the polo with the bubbly at the wrong temperature, there are settings for specific drinks. The setting for white wine, for instance, is slightly higher than the setting for champagne. Oh, and champagne isn’t champagne. Vintage bubbly should be chilled to 11-degrees (Celsius), while the non-vintage muck is better at six-degrees. Of course you knew that. Curiously, I could find no setting in the Rolls for `goon-bag’.
Fluffy ducts
The acoustic engineers at Rolls-Royce discovered pretty early on in the development of the Ghost that conventional air-conditioning duct materials created too much noise and echo as the perfectly chilled air passed through them. The solution was to internally smooth the ducts and then line them with felt to eliminate the racket.
Sweet harmony
While they were working on keeping the interior all hush-hush, those same acoustic engineers fitted dampening components to every interior fitting from the seat frames to the centre-console. The aim was to make everything resonate in harmony. Aftermarket sub-woofers will possibly not be an improvement in this car.
And to ensure that the boot didn’t become a boom-box of its own, the parcel-shelf has been fitted with invisible ports to balance the cabin frequencies with those in the boot.
Keyword: The life of a high roller: Seven signature high-end features that separate Rolls-Royce from other luxury car brands