Rolls-Royce is the epitome of luxurious vehicles – and none of them come cheap. However, anyone who takes the trouble to approach the company’s coachbuild department should put in a lot of capital. Because anyone who orders a car here employs an entire department for years. It costs.
The car manufacturer’s latest creation was discussed with the customer for the first time in 2019. Back then they were just the first drawings, of course. It would be more than four years before the official handover in Singapore. During this time, the manufacturer has put thousands of hours into the smallest details that the naked (or untrained) eye probably wouldn’t even notice.
On the one hand there is the wood. According to the manufacturer, the difficult-to-process Santos rosewood required 8,000 hours before the individual components were as desired. The coating apparently took a large part of the time to protect the wood from a wide variety of weather influences. This was necessary because the customer, who has been kept secret, wants to use the car worldwide and a wide range of temperatures and humidity levels had to be covered.
Typically Rolls-Royce: 1000 hours for a protective coating
Restrictions come into play that you wouldn’t even think of at first: Of course, using wood protection for motor yachts was also an obvious option for Rolls-Royce – until it became clear that this only works if the customer regularly maintains the coating carries out. So the idea was discarded and a new solution was sought – in the end a completely unique paint finish was found that only had to be applied a few times. According to the company’s own information, this step alone took 1,000 hours and produced 18 different mixtures.
The fact is that the new owner is now part of a very exclusive club that only includes a handful of other people. There are currently only three series from the Coachbuild department: Sweptail, Boat Tail and the three vehicles from the Droptail series, in which the Arcadia has now followed the La Rose Noir and the Amethyst.
About the price for that vehicle and Rolls-Royce remains silent about the buyer. Various media reports mention sums between 20 and 35 million euros, and similar sums have also been repeatedly suspected for the other Coachbuilt vehicles. Rolls-Royce denied this when asked starbut doesn’t correct the information either.