Rolls-Royce makes some of the world's most luxurious cars. Known for producing handcrafted automobiles that promise a seamless magical carpet ride for its customers, a Rolls Royce car does not come cheap. These are some of the best selling Rolls-Royce models and these are their entry level prices. But with virtually unlimited optional extras, upgrades and customizations, the true cost of a bespoke Rolls Royce has no limits. In fact, Rolls Royce refuses to even discuss its base prices. There isn't really a specific base price which we would discuss because it really depends on each customer as an individual and the bespoke options which they like to to design and develop with our with our bespoke team. So what are some of these bespoke extras and is that what makes Rolls Royce so expensive? One of the first obvious starting points probably is the color. We have a palette of 44,000 plus colours. We replicate people's lipsticks and something from your house, something your own, something you've seen, even we've done the dog of an owner, a red setter. So we exactly replicate them where they be by the DNA, the chemistry or whatever. For us, it's unique. It'll be registered to your colour and you can give it a name and it's yours. And if someone else has seen it and wants to use that exact finish, we have to go to that person and ask their permission when we go to the paint shop, you'll see it's called the Surface Finish Center because it's a bit of an insult to say. We're painting the car. It's more than that. You're going to have at least some layers of coat. There's primers, there's base coats, there's color. And unusually, we put on 2 clear coats of lacquer. But you could have up to 23 layers of coating, which we've done before, equating to about 45 kilograms in weight just of coat. In addition to the endless variations of color, Rolls Royce customers can infuse their paint with materials to create special effects. One particularly wealthy customer went one step further, requesting the addition of 1000 diamonds wanted a bit more sparkle in the finish, so gave us a bag of diamonds. We crushed them. They were infused into the paint.
Remarkably, the detailed paintwork on Rolls Royce cars is done by hand by just one person. My name is Mark Court and I am the coach liner for Rolls Royce motor cars. A coach liner means that I am able to put this pinstripe onto the side of the car. The uniqueness is the fact that I do it completely freehand and I'm the only one within Rolls Royce that can do this. That's slight worldwide within the Rolls Royce BMW Group so the brushes are used. That's why dove squirrel hair we found that most brushes nowadays are man made and which tends to leave brush marks within these lines. This is a natural hair, this natural hair teeth that tends to leave no marks at all. So we worked to 1 standard, which is the highest standard. So we use one that leaves no brush marks at all. And if customers without a coach line decide to add 1 to their car, mark is on hand to travel worldwide with his paintbrush. As normal with Rolls Royce, Rolls Royce never comes back to us. We go to it, so if it's in Dubai, so be it. That's where I have to go. There are several unmistakable features of every Rolls-Royce exterior. The handmade pantheon grill, the self writing wheel centres that ensure the R logo is never rotated and the spirit of ecstasy ornament in fact. In 2003, BMW paid $65 million to acquire the rights to the Rolls-Royce name symbol and the spirit of ecstasy. But it's inside the car where luxury and cost dramatically increases to create a virtually silent ride. Rolls Royce adds approximately 300 pounds the acoustic insulation around the cabin.
It's tyre manufacturer, Continental, even developed special foam filled tyres which reduced the noise of the road by 9 decibels. The results were so profound that Rolls Royce removed some soundproofing to avoid causing acoustic sensory deprivation.
The dashboard of the Rolls Royce Phantom can even become a bespoke art gallery. Customers have commissioned artists to produce all sorts of designs for this space, including this gold plated 3D printed stainless steel installation that replicates the customer's DNA profile. Another shining feature of Rolls Royce is the Starlight headliner. An intricate series of fibre optic roof lights that recreate the night sky. It takes up to 16 hours to build the satellite headliners. We're starting by drilling it and we perforate every single hole to fredh fiber optic through every single hole. We've got up to 1340 holes. We're doing this to achieve the stars yet on the sky, so we're going to have the sky in the night cover with the stars. As with all things Rolls Royce, customers can create bespoke Starlight. Designs, including randomly generated shooting stars. 1 customer even had their design matched to exactly replicate the constellation of stars from the night they were born. The embroidery on the upholstery is also tailor made to the customer's design choice. So there's no real standard process that's repeated with embroidery. Just because every single design is completely unique to the customer. It's not just a case of scanning in an image, turning it into embroidery. Every single aspect of the image is thought out the different angles of the stage will reflect the light in a different way. So rather than just being a flat image, we're trying to bring it out to that next level so it's almost 3 dimensional, like a hologram effect that you can get the last stitching. The most complex embroidery project Rolls Royce is completed is this special rose Phantom model, which consists of 1,000,000 individual stitches.
The Rose Phantom is the biggest embroidery we've done today. We'll have to map out exactly what order we're putting all those embroideries onto the leather so that they all join up to match some of the stitching. There's no tolerance. It can't be out by millimeter, otherwise it's completely written off just take a small aspect of the Rose Phantom, it's a good example of the development of one of the butterflies. What seems relatively simple and like an image, actually becomes a very complex for embroidery. So for the Phantom rose headliner, there's a few techniques that we hadn't used before because of the the scale of the Rose headliner.
we had to break it down into individual elements, so each individual butterfly, the flower heads themselves and then all the vines and leaves so you can see here. Basically, different layering of different colored stitches in different densities, and by building those up we can create that sort of fade effect where it's darker to the center fades out towards the wings. Fine tune them. The quality that we'd expect and then start combining it, bringing it all together for the whole headliner.
Rolls Royce has seen a boom in sales over the last 10 years. In 2019, sales increased by roughly 25% to 5152 units, with the average age of a Rolls Royce owner dropping from late 50s to mid 40s. Take Drake, for example, his pursuit can model a special edition of the Phantom left the factory at a value of about $700,000. However, the Customisations that Drake made, such as the diamond encrusted over OWL in place of the spirit of ecstasy, is thought to have brought the overall price to about $1,000,000. The most expensive Rolls Royce model ever built was the swept tail, the result of over four years work. This one-of-a-kind car was reported to cost $13 million previously, holding the title of the world's most expensive new car. But while other top end car manufacturers focus on speed maneuverability and super lightweight supercar status. Rolls Royce cars are expensive for one reason. Luxury !
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