The ultimate automotive luxury isn’t 40-way adjustable seats with a choice of tantric massage functions, a built-in minibar, or even the opportunity to fly your heraldic flag from the front fenders of your car. Rather, according to Rolls-Royce CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös, it’s exclusivity—which is why the British luxury automaker is planning a dramatic expansion of the number of bespoke options it will offer well-heeled buyers.
“For me, the future of luxury is that you have to get more and more bespoke,” Müller-Ötvös told us at the launch of the new Phantom. “People in this segment want to have something extremely special, something significantly different from what their friend has.”
While the one-off Rolls-Royce Sweptail proved that there is a market for ultralimited models, Müller-Ötvös said its development was too complicated for similar projects to be done more than occasionally. “That was a very successful experiment,” he said, “but it took us four years. You need to meet homologation. There are so many legal requirements you need to make. But after we launched it, I immediately had a couple of calls saying, ‘I want to be involved in the next one, please.’ The market potential is not the problem. The challenge is to make it happen and ultimately to have the right capacity for this kind of project.”
But Rolls-Royce’s new aluminum spaceframe architecture, known officially as the Architecture of Luxury, gives much more flexibility for limited-run models and also offers the possibility of allowing radically different components or even bodywork. “We have done some 3D printing,” Müller-Ötvös said, “and I think that our long-term goal is to print bigger parts; maybe even bodies are possible.” He also suggested that buyers will be able to customize the digital display screens in future models.
The challenge for the United States remains that fact that—uniquely among Rolls-Royce’s significant sales territories—a large percentage of cars are still bought from dealer stock rather than factory ordered, with Müller-Ötvös saying between 30 and 40 percent of new Rollers are a purchased through an “I want that one!” transaction.
But canny American dealers have hit on a solution: creating their own bespoke cars based around the known tastes of existing customers. “Our dealers are very smart. They are creating cars with customers in mind,” Müller-Ötvös explained, “knowing that, say, Mr. Miller is almost 100 percent certain to be coming by again and [then] creating a car they know he won’t be able to resist.”
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