Review: 2015 Rolls Royce Ghost Series II

by Collin Woodard

How do you review a Rolls Royce? At first glance, it would appear pretty straightforward, but considering that I trashed the first two drafts of this review and started over from scratch each time, it clearly is not straightforward. I thought it would be, but it’s not.

I wanted to think that I could just go drive the Ghost, spend a little time thinking through my impressions, write up a review, and send it off to Matt with some pretty pictures attached. In a day or two, the story would have several dozen views, a few shares on Facebook, and maybe even a couple likes.

Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out to be that simple because that only works with reviewing a normal car. I drive some whatever-mobile for a few hours, figure out what I like and don’t like about how it drives, and then type those driving impressions into a review while struggling to resist the urge to tweak my fantasy football lineup. The Rolls Royce Ghost Series II, however, is not a normal car, and trying to review it like a normal car just doesn’t work.

Part of the problem with that approach is that the Rolls Royce Ghost is not a particularly engaging driver’s car. Yes, it has an absolutely spectacular 6.6L V12 that’s one of the best engines in the world, but all 575 lb-ft of torque that it makes have to pull nearly three tons of vehicle, which means you won’t be drag racing any CTS-Vs from stoplight to stoplight. The ride is also so smooth and the interior so quiet, you don’t really feel its acceleration, even at wide open throttle. You just look down and realize that what feels more like 55 mph is actually a very illegal 110 mph and that you should probably slow down before Buford T. Justice decides to end your fun.

You shouldn’t expect the Ghost to be a canyon carver either. Throw it aggressively into a turn, and it will very quickly make you acutely aware of how much weight you’re working with. It doesn’t feel dangerous or out of control when you take a corner too quickly. It just feels intangibly wrong. In fact, I could almost feel the car pushing back, urging me to slow it down and be in a little bit less of a hurry.

Cheerio, old chap! There’s no need to rush. No one’s going to care if you’re ten minutes late. Just flip on the massage seats and listen to some classical music. Everything’s going to be okay.

Speaking of massage seats, due to a terribly cliché high school football injury, long drives almost always leave me with back pain. Even extraordinarily comfortable seats cause problems after an hour or two, and those massage seats were a godsend. I doubt car seats will ever give real life massage therapists a run for their money, but these did a great job of helping relieve the stress in my back, making the drive much more comfortable that it would have been.

Even without a massage going on though, the driver’s seat is still a great place to be. Considering that Ghost owners drive themselves much more frequently than Phantom owners do, that’s definitely important. The seat is ridiculously comfortable, and everything that you touch feels incredibly high quality. A lot of manufacturers focus on the main touch points but then use cheaper materials in other places to cut costs. In the Rolls Royce, if it isn’t covered in leather, it’s probably made out of something nicer. Have you ever put your feet on lambswool floor mats? I have, and they feel absolutely heavenly. Why all floor mats aren’t made out of lambswool, I don’t know. They are worth each one of the 130,000 pennies Rolls Royce asks for a set.

Sure, the ride is the opposite of sporty, it’s also extremely quiet and unimaginably smooth. Combined with the high beltline, you sit incredibly isolated, with all but the harshest road imperfections ironed out. Even the steering keeps what’s going on with the road to itself. It’s easy to drive, but you don’t feel like you’re driving so much as just gliding along. It actually feels a lot like how I would imagine Luke Skywalker’s T-16 felt, just with fewer womp rats to bullseye.

While it’s not actually a hovercraft, the Ghost does come packed with technology. There’s the usual host of luxury car features, like adaptive cruise control. but unlike other adaptive cruise control systems, the one in the Rolls Royce uses GPS data to slow down going into corners and then speed up on the way out. Other luxury car manufacturers have fancy laser and radar systems that read the road ahead, but to my knowledge, Rolls Royce is the only manufacturer to offer a system that already knows what the road is going to look like before the car gets there and can adapt accordingly.

Still, despite packing advanced technology, offering superb levels of comfort and luxury, and having a V12 engine that’s absolutely phenomenal, can the Ghost Series II actually be worth its $345,690 as-tested price? As a sum of its parts, I’d say no.

To judge a Rolls Royce by the sum of its parts, however, misses the fact that a Rolls Royce is so much more than the sum of its parts. When the chauffeur picked me up at the airport, people didn’t just take pictures of the car. At least two people took pictures of me. Lots of people take pictures of nice cars, me included, but they very rarely take pictures of anyone getting into or out of those cars. Because I was getting into a Rolls Royce, however, the people taking pictures of it assumed that I must be somebody special. Somewhere on Instagram, there’s probably a picture of me getting into the Ghost and a person who is convinced that they just saw a Jonas Brother.

Things didn’t change once we were on the road either, as we were almost rear-ended several times by a girl in an X3 who kept trying to take pictures of us. Everything in me wanted to brake-check her, but people who wreck Rolls Royces don’t get invited to drive Rolls Royces again, so I managed to resist. When we pulled up to the hotel, a small crowd gathered to get a look. Everywhere we went in the Ghost, we got attention. Nobody in our group of journalists was actually famous, but considering the amount of attention we got, you would have thought we were all headed to the Oscars.

Somehow, even people who know nothing about cars know that a Rolls Royce is special, and they automatically assume that the people who ride in them are special too. They’re expensive cars, yes, but they’re also rare. Even with sales on the rise, Rolls Royce still made only a couple thousand last year, which means that even if you have the money to purchase one, you still probably can’t have one, and that, my friends, is where the real value lies.

A Rolls Royce is not really a car. Sure, it has four wheels and can transport people like a car, but it’s so much more than that. Buying a Ghost is a lot like buying a Patek Philippe Calatrava. There isn’t a single person in the world who needs one, and there are much cheaper options that serve the same basic purpose, yet to the person who can appreciate it, it’s money well spent. Every piece is crafted and painstakingly assembled by hand, and even as the “entry level” Rolls Royce, the Ghost Series II is more like a four-wheeled timepiece than a car. It’s rare, it’s expensive, it’s special, and while I guarantee I’ll never own one, having the opportunity to drive one for a day was an amazing experience.

Now if I could just get the TSA to give me back my Grey Poupon.

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