How BMW Won the Battle for Rolls-Royce and Reinvented the Phantom

BMW’s highway to proudly owning Rolls-Royce started lengthy earlier than the primary Phantom rolled out of Goodwood. Within the early Nineteen Nineties, the Munich automaker made an unsuccessful bid to purchase stakes in each Rolls-Royce and Bentley. A decade later, they lastly bought their probability — however not with no difficult battle with Volkswagen. At first, VW ended up with the designs, the Spirit of Ecstasy emblem, and the well-known Pantheon grille, whereas BMW only secured the Rolls-Royce name and trademarks. For a number of months, it regarded like VW would possibly construct Rolls-Royce automobiles utilizing BMW’s engines underneath a licensing deal. Ultimately, the 2 sides struck an settlement: beginning in 2003, BMW would take full management of Rolls-Royce, whereas VW kept Bentley.

Kickstarting the Rolls-Royce Model

As soon as the settlement was in place, BMW confronted an uncommon problem: launching a brand new Rolls-Royce with no single carryover design or blueprint from the outgoing Silver Seraph. The corporate had the title, the badge, and the model’s heritage — however not one of the bodily parts that made a Rolls immediately recognizable. That meant beginning with a clean sheet of paper, reimagining each line and element from the bottom up.

Designer Ian Cameron set to work adopting the Pantheon grille (which was, at first, off-limits as a part of the model’s mental property) and reimagining the Spirit of Ecstasy for BMW’s first Rolls-Royce, the seventh generation Rolls-Royce Phantom. It changed the Silver Seraph as Rolls’s full-size luxurious sedan, which meant it wanted epic proportions that heralded simply how a lot cash you have been sharing the highway with. As such, the Phantom touted a protracted wheelbase and hood and excessive roof with tall wheels and tires. Below the hood, the larger-than-life aesthetic continued. BMW bored and stroked their current V12, the N73, to six.75 liters. The brand new mill provided 453 horsepower at 531 pound-feet of torque, with a lot of the torque obtainable from simply 1,000 rpm.

Constructing Intrigue

Just like BMW’s advertising and marketing blitz on the US with the MINI model, Rolls-Royce’s debut oozed fashion. The automobile debuted in simply three cities — Culver Metropolis, California, Miami, and Lyndhurst, New Jersey — in nondescript industrial buildings. You might solely be invited if a Rolls-Royce dealership vouched for you and accompanied you to the viewing. The cloak and dagger added to the attract, and it labored. “It had a very James Bond-like high quality, and folks cherished it,” recounts Robert Austin, Rolls-Royce’s North American Communications Director on the time.

The Phantom’s success was robust sufficient that BMW quickly started work on a smaller “entry-level” Rolls-Royce, the Ghost. Although nonetheless priced round $280,000, it was marketed because the “on a regular basis” Rolls. As designer Ian Cameron defined to The New York Instances in 2004: “Our homeowners sometimes have a five- or six-car storage. The Phantom is perhaps a tuxedo…[the Ghost], a enterprise swimsuit. The tailor cuts the fabric the identical method, however the swimsuit is totally different.” Right this moment, Rolls-Royce sells greater than ten occasions as many automobiles because it did in 2003 — a metamorphosis that started with the Phantom and the extraordinary circumstances of BMW’s takeover. What began as a failed bid within the Nineteen Nineties grew to become one among BMW’s most strategic victories, cast in tense negotiations with Volkswagen and the choice to design a Rolls-Royce fully from scratch.