Rolls Royce Phantom II, The Chauffeured Review (7.5/10)

Having a nice dinner with a good bottle of wine is a good thing, but having a nice dinner with a well-aged bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape is an occasion to be savored.

But what is really the difference? If you just gave most people a glass of nameless wine, even if it were something like Châteauneuf-du-Pape, then it either tastes good or it doesn’t. But knowing that you have something very special changes the experience entirely. The focus of the aforementioned dinner becomes all about appreciating the wine, with the food as a secondary concern. In reality, it may well be somewhat of a placebo effect, but it makes you feel special, and that is something people crave. This is precisely the appeal of the Rolls Royce Phantom.

Rolls Royces used to have vastly superior build quality to other cars on the market, but that time has long past. This is not to say that a modern Rolls is anything but rock solid, but more that the build quality of “lesser” luxury cars has caught up.

Look, there comes a point at which leather is leather and wood is wood. I know that Rolls Royce likes to put a fancy spin on their materials, but in the end of the day it winds up feeling sketchy, like when a pot dealer comes up with some impressive-sounding name for their product while they hand you a plain old bag of whatever that they grew in their basement. I’m sure we’d all like to have fine wood veneer crafted from the actual cross that bore Christ, but really, the standard oak or mahogany does the same job just fine.

The point I’m making, and I’m sure some people may want to crucify me for saying this, is that a modern Rolls isn’t really any nicer than a loaded Audi A8 or Mercedes S-Class, certainly not $300,000 nicer. That means the only reason to spring for a Rolls is for that “special” feeling it will give you inside, but hey, looking good is feeling good right?

The old saying from when Rolls Royce and Bentley were intertwined was that “a Bentley was a car to drive, and a Rolls Royce was a car to be driven in.” Being chauffeured is probably the first thing that comes to mind when Rolls Royce comes up in conversation, and many of their customers still purchase their cars without any intention of ever getting behind the wheel themselves. This is why I chose to hop in the back seat during Al’s drive of this shiny new Phantom II, so I could critique the car from the perspective of a passenger.

The main thing you notice when first stepping into the car is how simple and clean everything is. It almost feels spartan until you start fiddling around with things and find that all of the controls and features you’d expect in a car of this magnitude have been neatly tucked away around the cabin. The attention to detail is really quite clever, actually.

Pull out the tray table in front of you, and you will find that it doubles as the infotainment system when you flip up the tray table to reveal an interactive screen. Pull down the center armrest, and the control panel for the system pops out neatly for you to operate.

The seat itself is very plush and comfortable. It wasn’t individually adjustable on our demo car, but I found the seating posture to be spot-on. There was plenty of room to stretch out, so I just sat back and enjoyed the ride, occasionally barking orders at Al to speed up or slow down, just for the sake of doing so.

Ingress and egress is also quite an easy affair in a Phantom because it’s roofline is actually quite high. Most people probably won’t even need to duck their heads on entry, and once situated, simply press a button, and the heavy suicide door will shut itself with a quiet “woosh.”

The Phantom is clearly a very well-engineered and solidly built car, that much you can tell from feel of it alone. The gadgets are one thing, but the way the car seems to remove you from the onslaught of the world is remarkable. The windows are made of double-pane glass, and the car rides on a silky-soft air suspension. Whether it be a pothole in the road, or just the loud, ambient noises of the peasantry, the Rolls will make sure that it isn’t a bother.

Riding in a Rolls Royce Phantom is a sublimely peaceful experience, locked away from any care in the world. It’s a lot like riding in any other car except every so often you get to think to yourself, “I’m in a Rolls right now” and that makes you feel “fancy.”

I find there to be an “If you want something done right, then do it yourself” sort of theme to Rolls Royce. A lot of it comes from their history, but a lot of it also comes from the “rugged individualist” types who would treat themselves to a car such as this. It really is all about ego.

The way I see it, Mercedes-Benz is the effective standard of the automotive world, specifically the S-Class. The Rolls Phantom isn’t objectively any better than the current Mercedes S600, but everyone and their brother has a Mercedes, while very few people drive a Rolls Royce.

We live in a time now when many business high-ups are chauffeured out of necessity to keep them productive while in transit between meetings. Say a CEO makes $2,000 an hour. It is way more cost effective to pay a driver $20 an hour to drive the CEO around than it is to make the CEO stop working and focus on driving for themselves. Not all that glamorous, is it?

But for real, a company would be stupid to buy a Rolls Royce to drive their CEO around in when an Audi A8L TDI will do the same job for one fifth of the price, and using a lot less fuel to boot. Business is all about the bottom line, and a Rolls Royce, even at this high, corporate level, is too much of a luxury item.

So that really just leaves ultra-wealthy people who want to feel special, or limousine services who rent vehicles to normal people who want to feel special, if only for one evening. Luckily for Rolls Royce, there are a lot of people who want to feel extra special in this world.

Rolls Royce still builds the same sort of cars today that they built back in the roaring 1920’s, and they are the only one. The truth is that this level of luxury car, originally built for the captains of industry before income tax, no longer fits in the world we live in. It is vulgarly ostentatious because, as an object, it is largely pointless. Sure there are more expensive supercars out there, but they are expensive because they stand at the tip of the technological spear. A Rolls Phantom, on the other hand, is a shiny new relic from a bygone era, a living, breathing brontosaurus, if you will. So anyone who buys a Phantom is spending a lot of extra money just for the sake of doing so.

I’m glad the Phantom exists, though. Rolls Royce has managed to keep the ultra-luxury car alive, albeit with a distinction that is purely superficial. Mercedes tried to compete for a while with the Maybach, but it didn’t sell like the Rolls because it wasn’t as shockingly distinctive. That, above anything else, proves that ultra-luxury cars are entirely about the image people believe they get from owning one.

This is the fashion industry, not the car industry… transportation has nothing to do with it.

I always liked the Maybach better than the Phantom, and I still do. I liked that the Maybach was a bit more subdued in its style. However, at the same time, every time I saw a Maybach, I always mistook it for an S-Class before I realized what it really was. That, right there was its problem, and that’s why Maybach sold half the cars in ten years that Rolls Royce sold last year, in 2013.

A Rolls Royce is the ultimate status symbol. The one-upper’s golden chariot.

In the end of the day, while I did thoroughly enjoy my time riding in the Phantom, I’m just not really a traditional Rolls Royce kind of person. Everything about such cars is rooted in petty one-upmanship, and that isn’t something I like to concern myself with. I am, however, a big fan of Rolls Royce’s Wraith, but that is a totally new sort of car for them, a driver-focused GT car, and a sure departure from tradition. Call it a guilty pleasure, if you will.

The Phantom is a very “nice” car, but that’s a given with a Rolls. The truth is that “nice” is something you can get in a loaded Toyota Avalon these days, and the quality of the Phantom is all but equalled by the time we get to an Audi or Mercedes costing around $100,000. At the end of the day, the real value of a Rolls Royce lies in the fact that it is a “Rolls Royce.”