Owning a Rolls-Royce isn’t a sign that you’re striving for the top—if you own a Rolls-Royce, you’re probably already there. But the top is changing, and a generation of crypto traders and Silicon Valley overnight billionaires are finding themselves perched there much earlier in life than they may have expected. Still, while there may be one or two more sports cars in their fleet than someone at a later stage of life, each is finding that their collection is not complete unless there’s a Rolls in the garage.
With the Black Badge Ghost, the newest car to join the Rolls-Royce fleet, those sports cars may be spending more time in the garage, and owners may find themselves yearning to be in the driver’s seat of the traditionally-chauffeured car more than ever before.
Not that this is a sports car—Rolls themselves are quick to tell you that. But it may be the car that makes you stop worrying about the distinction, because the Black Badge Ghost, more than any Rolls before it, perhaps better than any car before it, can handle whatever you throw at it, and the further you push it, the more it shows you the extraordinary things it can do. To put it simply, this is the most complete driving experience Rolls-Royce has ever released to the market.
We’re five years now into the Black Badge project for Rolls-Royce, a line of cars tailored to a more urgent and bold character, with a stripped back, ‘post-opulent’ aesthetic as they call it that captured the darker spirit that more and more were asking for in their custom-made designs, first with the Wraith and Ghost in 2016, then the Dawn in 2017, then the Cullinan in 2019.
With the latest Black Badge Ghost, equipped with technology never-before-seen in the previous models, the Black Badge has fully come of age, and perhaps even surpassed its silver counterparts in many ways.
A professional driver who has had the opportunity to drive the car from one side of Europe to the other told me something startling—even with all the supercars he’s had under his care, he made the journey faster than he ever had before. That’s not just because of the speeds that it can reach, but the comfort at which it can handle them, comfort both for the car and the driver, with increased torque and flexibility, with transmission and throttle treatments that makes kicking things into gear feel seamless.
Having driven the car both to its limits on a closed course and along the English countryside, as well as experienced a relaxed drive from the backseat, it was clear this car has gained a lot while sacrificing little.
As Rolls-Royce moves towards a fully electric future, with the entire fleet planned to become electric at the start of the next decade, I’m reminded of camera culture. Before the entire industry moved to digital, it was those last flagship SLRs that harnessed the best of modern technology while capturing the purity of spirit of film, cameras that performed far better than their price point should have allowed.
Because they straddled those decades though, camera enthusiasts ignore them. It’s a forgotten era, as perhaps this one will be decades down the line as all cars move to electric. Perhaps the collectors of the future will only be yearning for the classic cars of the 60s and 70s.
They would be fools to do so, however. This, especially for Rolls-Royce, will perhaps be its best era, the one that captures the best of what was and the best of what is to come. Bless those crypto kids, if they’re the ones that brought about the Black Badge Ghost. What a car.