ROLLS-ROYCE GHOST: A SYMBOL OF ENDLESS PURE EXPRESSION
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars launched the first Ghost in 2009 at the Frankfurt Motor Show. More compact than the marque’s pinnacle product, Phantom, it was created for a new group of clients who desired a more modest, minimalist expression of Rolls-Royce perfection in design, engineering and craftsmanship.
The Ghost Extended variant followed in 2011. An updated Series II Ghost was unveiled at the 2014 Geneva Motor Show, with the first Black Badge Ghost making its debut two years later.
Over the course of its 10-year lifecycle, the first-generation Ghost became the most successful product in the company’s history, enabling Rolls-Royce to scale up production, invest in its capabilities and establish itself as a truly global luxury brand. Production ended in 2019, an event commemorated in the Ghost Zenith Collection.
The present Ghost, built on the same Architecture of Luxury spaceframe as Phantom, Cullinan and Spectre, was launched in 2020: the line-up also includes Ghost Extended and Black Badge Ghost, launched in 2021.
GHOST PHILOSOPHY AND POSITIONING
Ghost is a study in reduction, minimalism and simplicity. Its purity provides the ideal blank canvas for Bespoke commissions, with clients able to exercise their ambitious creativity and express their personal tastes almost entirely free of technical and aesthetic constraints.
That purity presents possibility. It creates potential as boundless as the owner’s imagination, emboldening them to bring colour, energy and vibrancy to their commission and to allow beautiful materials, expert craftsmanship and exquisite details speak for themselves, subtle and unadorned.
A NEW APPROACH TO LUXURY
Ghost’s design reflects a marked shift in clients’ attitudes to luxury that has occurred since its first incarnation. Today’s luxury consumers consciously reject extravagance and ostentation: their tastes are defined by reduction, simplicity and substance, and the intelligent, considered selection and unobtrusive application of exceptional materials and craftsmanship. Every element of Ghost therefore has relevance, purpose and integrity. This philosophy is the antithesis of ‘premium mediocrity’, a term coined by the fashion industry for otherwise unremarkable products that rely on contrivance, superficial details and meaningless aesthetic artifice to create an illusion of luxury.
Ghost is also designed for a younger client cohort, often self-made and invariably self-confident and self-reliant, who tend to be self-drivers by default, and thus take a keen interest in their motor car’s driving experience and dynamics.
THE CURRENT GHOST MODEL
Ghost is perfect in its simplicity; but creating this purity of expression was one of the marque’s greatest-ever technical challenges. It incorporates state-of-the-art equipment and functions including:
- LED and laser headlights with more than 600m of illuminated range, plus vision assist
- Alertness assistant
- Four-camera system with panoramic view, all-round visibility and helicopter view
- Active cruise control
- Collision, cross-traffic, lane departure and lane change warnings
- Industry-leading 7×3 high-resolution head-up display (HUD)
- On-board Wi-Fi hotspot
- Self-park system
- Bespoke navigation and entertainment systems.
Ghost is built on the marque’s proprietary Architecture of Luxury spaceframe, as used in its flagship Phantom, Cullinan SUV and all-electric Spectre. The aluminium spaceframe’s flexibility and scalability creates an acoustically superior, highly rigid and dynamic platform, based around four fixed points, one at each corner of the motor car. The moveable aluminium bulkhead, floor, crossmembers and sill panels are positioned specifically to make Ghost as enjoyable to drive as it is to be driven in. Pushing two of the cast suspension mounting assemblies to the very front and placing the 6.75-litre V12 behind the front axle, gives an optimum 50/50 weight distribution.
Ghost has all-wheel drive, all-wheel steering and a Planar Suspension System specifically designed to enhance the marque’s hallmark ‘magic carpet ride’.
Read the full article here: ROLLS-ROYCE GHOST: A SYMBOL OF ENDLESS PURE EXPRESSION
