2010 Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe – Road Test « New and Used Car Listings

2010 Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe – Road Test

It’s always been easy to make fun of a Rolls-Royce. “At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise is from the ticking of the bomb planted by the IRA.” But drive a new Phantom drophead coupe and the wisecracks will, ahem, drop right out of your head. There is a 453-hp, 6.8-liter 48-valve V-12 making the car capable of zero to 60 in 5.5 seconds (much faster than the IRA moves these days) and producing a top speed of 148 miles per hour. Computer limitation keeps the Rolls from accelerating further. I did not quite reach limited velocity on the corduroy- and moon ­crater–textured squiggle of my local New Hampshire roads. Or, if I did, I’m not saying so within Google-reach of small-town police departments.

But I will say the Phantom goes faster than the stink of how rich you’d have to get to buy one. It handles with the educated precision of the Nobel Prize–winning physicist that you’d have to be to repair it. And, thanks to brake discs the size of precious and irreplaceable Edith Piaf original vinyl LPs (14.7 inches in front, 14.6 in back), the Phantom comes to a halt as abruptly as the fall in net worth among Rolls-Royce’s customers while the drophead coupe was in its poorly timed production-planning stage.

Combine the Phantom drophead coupe’s cardinal performance virtues with a 0.37 coefficient of drag (better than an E-type’s) and a six-speed automatic (two more gears than I can usually find when I’m trying to drive fast), and you get a car that makes you feel like you could win Le Mans. And you probably could win Le Mans, at least back in the day, before Gurney and Foyt and their Ford GT40 got into the act (and assuming Gurney and Foyt were driving your Rolls).

Such praise should come as no surprise for a car that starts at $448,000. It better be good. What’s shocking is not the enormity of the price or the enormity of the speed but the enormity of the enormity. A Phantom drophead coupe is almost as long and wide as a GMC Yukon XL and within one fat child of the same curb weight. Yet the Rolls drives like a Porsche—a Cayenne, at least. Wayne York Kung, product communications manager for Rolls-Royce North America, said it definitively: “The faster you drive, the smaller it gets.”

That, however, brings us to the conundrum of the Rolls. I can put myself, wife, three children, three dogs, and everything we own except the swing set in a Yukon XL. The Phantom has only two seatbelts in the back and less than a Camry’s worth of legroom. We’ll have to find our dogs a new home at a Pan-Asian restaurant and downsize family middle management. Muffin, the 11-year-old, has been blasting her iPod’s Miley Cyrus tunes through the car radio lately. Looks like she’ll be the one cashing in her 401k.

Those who are driving a drophead coupe to attract members of the opposite sex obviously aren’t getting to first base or they’d need room for the natural results of what they’re trying to get up to. And if sex isn’t the point, well, then, don’t people who drive $448,000 cars have friends? I do not object to an 18-foot land yacht. (Ostentation? Eight­een feet wouldn’t count for much among the yachty set.) But shouldn’t you be able to invite your pals aboard?

The cover for our Phantom’s convertible top is made of handsome marine teak—part of a $17,550 package, with the stainless-steel hood—that I’m told was inspired by the J-class America’s Cup of the 1930s. A sleek and fast “street sloop” is not unheard of. There was once a gorgeous 1929 Lancia Lambda tourer with three full rows of bench seats. You could give a ride to most of the remaining Republicans in Congress. And then you could take them someplace until they get a clue. But the GOP is going to have to really mess up in 2010 to fit in the Rolls.

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Maybe the Phantom drophead coupe inhabits a stratum above utilitarianism (the way the Smart Fortwo inhabits a stratum below it). Maybe the Phantom is simply a thing of beauty, an end in itself, automotive ars gratia artis. If so, Rolls-Royce had better get its ars in gear. Viewed side-on, the Phantom is indeed achingly beautiful. It’s almost as pretty when seen from above (no easy matter since the beltline is up around the elastic on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s shorts). The brushed stainless-steel hood and A-pillars are impressive feats of engineering and craftsmanship. But this metalwork seems aimed to appeal to the small group of people who are both hopeless car nuts and avid fans of the 1950s sculptor David Smith, who worked in similar abstract monumental shapes of steel. This group is so small that I think it consists of me and David Smith (whose welding skills were learned at the Studebaker factory). And David Smith is dead.Continued…