2023 Rolls-Royce Ghost Amber Roads

BACKGROUND

Rolls-Royce Motor Cars launched the first Ghost in 2009 at the Frankfurt Motor Show. More compact than the marque’s pinnacle product, Phantom, it was created for a new group of clients who desired a more modest, minimalist expression of Rolls-Royce perfection in design, engineering and craftsmanship. The Ghost Extended variant followed in 2011. An updated Series II Ghost was unveiled at the 2014 Geneva Motor Show, with the first Black Badge Ghost making its debut two years later.

Over the course of its 10-year lifecycle, the first-generation Ghost became the most successful product in the company’s history, enabling Rolls-Royce to scale up production, invest in its capabilities and establish itself as a truly global luxury brand. Production ended in 2019, an event commemorated in the Ghost Zenith Collection.

The present Ghost, built on the same Architecture of Luxury spaceframe as Phantom, Cullinan and Spectre, was launched in 2020: the line-up also includes Ghost Extended and Black Badge Ghost, launched in 2021.


GHOST PHILOSOPHY AND POSITIONING

Ghost is a study in reduction, minimalism and simplicity. Its purity provides the ideal blank canvas for Bespoke commissions, with clients able to exercise their ambitious creativity and express their personal tastes almost entirely free of technical and aesthetic constraints.

That purity presents possibility. It creates potential as boundless as the owner’s imagination, emboldening them to bring colour, energy and vibrancy to their commission and to allow beautiful materials, expert craftsmanship and exquisite details speak for themselves, subtle and unadorned.

A NEW APPROACH TO LUXURY

Ghost’s design reflects a marked shift in clients’ attitudes to luxury that has occurred since its first incarnation. Today’s luxury consumers consciously reject extravagance and ostentation: their tastes are defined by reduction, simplicity and substance, and the intelligent, considered selection and unobtrusive application of exceptional materials and craftsmanship. Every element of Ghost therefore has relevance, purpose and integrity. This philosophy is the antithesis of ‘premium mediocrity’, a term coined by the fashion industry for otherwise unremarkable products that rely on contrivance, superficial details and meaningless aesthetic artifice to create an illusion of luxury.

Ghost is also designed for a younger client cohort, often self-made and invariably self-confident and self-reliant, who tend to be self-drivers by default, and thus take a keen interest in their motor car’s driving experience and dynamics.