Is Rolls Royce Guilty of Wretched Excess?

Enuff already…

by Wallace Wyss –

Far be it from me, a lifelong devotee of car styling especially of bespoke cars where the designers are allowed to offer customers the ultimate in creating something special just for them, to then knock the practice of custom ordering from an automaker.

But the other day, when wading through what must be a 2,000-word press release on a new Rolls Royce one-off called the Arcadia, another one-off bespoke Rolls drophead, I realize how silly it all sounds–8,000 hours building a modified car, with endless hours in getting the wood grain all pointing in the right direction. Are they really spending thousands of hours and millions of dollars worrying about wood grain? Compare to Elon Musk who spent millions devising new ways to build cars. New battery designs to make EVs cheaper to build. His contributions are changing car history, indeed in some countries Teslas are the leading car selling.

Overall, the drop tails don’t come close to the drama of the design sketches — too fat and ponderous. You can dress a 300 lb. lady in a dress that copies Marilyn Monroe’s shimmering metallic dress (the one she wore when singing Happy Birthday to JFK) but she will still be a 300-b. lady.

I would be glad to take a chain saw to the clay model and cut some of the fat out of it so the actual cars look like the drawings. I suppose my weariness with Rolls going on and on about these specials that cost upwards of $32 million each (the Arcadia) is that, at the same time, switch a channel, the news channels are reporting children dying in bombing in the middle east and in America towns wiped off the map by storms exceeding all previous records.

I’d be so much happier if Rolls kept the modifications to a mere million on each boat tail and instead donated their excess funds for manufactured housing to the homeless swept up in these acts of nature and to families nearly wiped out by wanton acts of war. Look at Subaru–a company that makes a tiny amount of profit compared to Rolls on each car, in a special program Subaru and its retailers donate to charities for every new car sold or leased during the event. The event takes place annually from November to January. Customers can choose a national charity, like the ASPCA, Make-A-Wish, Meals on Wheels, or the National Park Foundation, or a local charity selected by the retailer. In 2023, Subaru and its retailers donated over $288 million to charity.

It’s like that question “How many angels can dance in the head of a pin?” Rolls is looking increasingly out of touch with reality. No one knows, no one cares, that Rolls is spending millions on fretting about things that don’t really matter when there are more pressing emergencies world wide. Once they got past one million customizing one car, I began to tune out. And again that boat tail shape–I’ve seen that rear deck “boat tail” before, (they say it’s from ’30s Rolls) in a 1960 Plymouth convertible (ignore the tail fins…). So we’re supposed to applaud $100 million or more being spent to create a rear decklid shape for a handfull of cars when you can probably buy that same slope in a decklid in a junkyard for $50.

I still believe in innovative design but Rolls, with these elaborate boat tails, is looking increasingly remote, kind of like the bandleader on the deck of the Titanic, fretting about what song his band should play next as the slope of the deck precariously increases…

Let us know what you think in the Comments.

THE AUTHOR Wallace Wyss is a fine artist who will be offering 20″ x 30″ giclee canvas prints of his own painting of the F80. Interested parties contact him at malibucarart@gmail.com