The eight best Rolls‑Royces ever made

There are probably some fine economic reasons why Rolls-Royce has continued to build cars for more than a century, and a quick flick through the company history books will offer up several big corporate near-death experiences, but one plausible explanation for its success is that it has always tried to cater for the individual customer as well as possible. You want one of the trees from your garden to be made into a dashboard? No problem. You’re really keen to have a microwave installed in between the rear seats? That’s fine, just make sure you have a few pot noodles at the ready. Whatever it is, within reason, Rolls-Royce has tried to go above and beyond, which is why it has been responsible for some of the finest cars on the planet.

Rolls-Royce 10hp – 1904

It would be foolish to create a list of the best Rolls-Royces ever made without including the company’s first creation, the first product of the business partnership between Charles Rolls and Henry Royce. The 10hp debuted at the 1904 Paris Salon show, and as the name suggests it had a 1.8-litre, two-cylinder 10 horsepower engine – 10.1PS (7kW) to be precise. Built in Cooke Street, Manchester, it was priced at a very reasonable sounding £395. Well, reasonable until you think a house in central London could have been bought for roughly the same money.

Loosely based on Royce’s first attempt at a car in 1903, the Royce 10, which itself was based on Royce’s own Decauville, it was quiet and comfortable, qualities that are very much at the core of everything Rolls-Royce does today.

The oldest 10hp known to exist today, registration U44, was sold by Bonhams in 2007 for £3.5million. A fair price for the oldest Rolls-Royce in the world.

Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost – 1907

If that Rolls-Royce doesn’t sound luxurious enough, then three years after the 10hp came something with much more oomph… The Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost.

Production of the Silver Ghost started in Manchester in 1907 before moving to Derby in 1908, and unlike the 10hp it had a 7.0-litre six-cylinder engine with 40 or 50PS (29kw or 37kW). In fact it wasn’t actually called the Silver Ghost to begin with but the 40/50hp, following the same nomenclature as the 10hp. There weren’t many cars out and about back then, but for Autocar magazine to have said “The running of this car at slow speeds is the smoothest thing we have ever experienced” in April 1907 would have given the company, its workers and both Henry Royce and Charles Rolls, quite a boost.

Over the course of 20 years the engine grew from a 7.0- to a 7.4-litre, the chassis was strengthened, the suspension upgraded, brakes fitted to all four wheels and the gearbox changed from a four-speed overdrive unit to a three-speed box with a direct-drive top gear. The development car, chassis 60551,was even entered into the Scottish Reliability Trial, a 15,000-mile endurance slog, which it completed with ease, setting a new speed record in the process. Another car (pictured, 1915 chassis 9AD) was driven from London to Edinburgh in top gear alone, a 400-mile journey on which the car managed an average of 24.3mpg, before being driven at Brooklands for a top speed test during which it managed 78mph, and later 101.8mph with different bodywork.

The Silver Ghost remains the longest-produced Rolls-Royce in the company’s history, with 6,173 cars built between Manchester and Derby from 1907 to 1925, and another 1,703 built in Springfield, USA, until 1926. It was also the last Rolls-Royce built under Charles Rolls, who was the first British citizen to be killed in an aeroplane crash when the tail of his Wright Flyer broke off during an air display.

Rolls-Royce Phantom I – 1925

The Phantom name is not a new one. In fact it was first used way back in 1925. It had a different six-cylinder engine than the Silver Ghost, and a larger one at 7.6-litres, as well as some small tweaks to the chassis, brakes, steering and suspension. It was a comprehensively better car, although it never quite received the same praise as the Silver Ghost, chiefly because the that car’s brilliance was a total surprise and people expected the Phantom to be just as good if not better.

Like the Silver Ghost, customers bought the chassis and mechanicals from Rolls-Royce before commissioning a body from a coachbuilder, which is why you’re highly unlikely to find one today with exactly the same bodywork as another.

The Phantom I was built from 1925 to 1929, the Phantom II, the last of the ‘40/50hp’ Rolls-Royces, was built from 1929 to 1936, and the Phantom III, the only V12 Rolls-Royce until the Silver Seraph in 1998, was built until the outbreak of World War II. The car pictured was a 1927 Phantom I, chassis 14RF, owned by King Edward VIII.

Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith – 1946

In the 1930s Rolls-Royce had purchased Bentley, and as such the two businesses were able to build better cars and produce them for less money, sharing various components before tuning them for either Bentley or Rolls-Royce. The Silver-Wraith was not the first car built after the two companies united, but it was the first car built by Rolls post-war, with production starting in 1946.

The chassis was made in Crewe at the old Rolls-Royce Merlin engine plant (demand for the Merlin engine dropped somewhat after the end of the war…) alongside the Bentley Mark VI, but for the first time Rolls-Royce would actually sell you a standard body, too, rather than a chassis you had to go away and clothe yourself. Available with a straight-six engine of 4.3-, 4.6- and later 4.9-litres, it was smaller than the pre-war Phantom and, Rolls-Royce believed, better suited the national mood of post-war austerity. It was even available with a four-speed automatic gearbox from 1952, the joint-first automatic Rolls. It might have been from General Motors, but considering there hasn’t been a manual Rolls-Royce for several decades it’s quite an important machine.

Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud – 1955

We’ve had the Silver Ghost, the Silver Wraith, and now it’s the Silver Cloud. The Silver Cloud was the Silver Dawn’s replacement (that’s right, another Silver), and it was visually a very different car – big and imposing yes, but it didn’t have quite the box in the middle, covered wheels at the corners look that the Silver Dawn and in fact every Rolls-Royce and many other cars had had since the 1920s.

A very strong relation to the Bentley S1, the Silver Cloud used a box-section chassis, and had better brakes and better suspension than the Silver Dawn – it even had electrically controlled damping, not to mention power steering and air conditioning come 1956. A four-speed automatic gearbox came as standard, and the car made use of a 4.9-litre straight-six (series II and III models were given 6.2-litre V8s) with adequate power to reach more than 100mph, although Rolls-Royce wouldn’t say exactly how much power…

Rolls-Royce needed to show it could build a thoroughly modern car, and that’s exactly what the Silver Cloud was.

Rolls-Royce Corniche – 1971

The Corniche name was first used in 1939 when Rolls-Royce was developing a new car based on the Bentley Mark V. After 15,000 miles of European testing it was destroyed by a bomb before it could make its way back to the UK, and what with the outbreak of World War II, new car development wasn’t at the top of the list of company priorities. The name was banked, however, and used for the first time in 1971.

Available as a coupe or a convertible, the Corniche used a 6.75-litre V8 with around 240PS (176kW), with power going to the rear wheels via a three-speed automatic transmission from General Motors. It had disc brakes, ventilated from 1972, as well as independent suspension with some of the same hydraulic levelling technology used by Citroën, built under licence by Rolls-Royce. Advanced? With the exception of the GM gearbox, absolutely.

Just under 4,500 were built over 25 years, three quarters of which were convertibles.

Rolls-Royce Phantom – 2003

Rolls-Royce has been bought three times in its 11-decade-plus existence, by Vickers, Volkswagen and BMW. The stories of those ownership transfers are interesting enough (how BMW managed to swipe Rolls-Royce from Volkswagen is a truly excellent example of corporate nous), but each of them presented management a problem: how to convince the world that Rolls-Royce was still British at heart, with the same ambition for excellence. When the company joined BMW there were fears that every new Rolls-Royce would be a big BMW with a different body, but thankfully, with a newfound and rather large company chequebook, Rolls-Royce could build the best car in its history: the new Rolls-Royce Phantom.

The Phantom VII was a gamechanger. The first car to be built at the new Rolls-Royce facility at Goodwood, its 6.75-litre V12 was the silkiest of silky smooth, the double-wishbone suspension could absorb almost any bump the road could offer without the occupants knowing, the windows were so well double glazed and the sound deadening so thick that there was nearly no road noise at all, and the six-speed gearbox was the best fitted to any Rolls-Royce. Add to that the choice of more than 44,000 standard colours (you could have your own created, of course), the umbrellas in the doors (heated to ensure they would be dry for use) and the ‘power reserve’ dial, and it’s clear to understand why the Phantom proved such a hit. (You can find out how you buy a Rolls-Royce by watching our video.) 

It was estimated that Rolls-Royce sold a little over 10,000 Phantoms from 2003 to 2017, which, considering prices for the Phantom started at £250,000 back in 2003 and every single one of those 10,000 cars would have been customised with options, it was a huge commercial success.

Rolls-Royce Cullinan – 2018

Now some people will get very, very angry that the Cullinan features on this list. Very angry indeed. I can understand that, but before we all get too red faced, let’s look at what Rolls-Royce had to do. They had to make a car that still looked, felt and drove like a Rolls-Royce, and by that I mean it had to be powerful, imposing, quiet and utterly luxurious, and have the capability of being driven off-road. Forget the fact that many owners might not drive it off-road and it has been built as a response to the craze for SUVs, and just think that Rolls-Royce had to engineer it to be a good off-roader in case an owner wanted to use it that way. There are better off-roaders in this world, but the Cullinan can drive off the beaten track confidently, and to that end it’s a bit of a technological masterpiece.

Named after the largest diamond ever discovered, the one that sits so neatly in the British Crown Jewels, the Cullinan is built with an aluminium chassis, has a 6.75-litre twin-turbo V12 with 571PS (420kW), a whopping 850Nm (627lb ft) of torque at 1,600rpm, four-wheel-drive, four-wheel-steering, and an eight-speed ZF transmission that uses satellite data to prepare the correct gear for the gradient of the road or an approaching corner. It has a camera that scans the road ahead and adjusts the suspension accordingly to create a ‘magic carpet ride’ (don’t worry, it isn’t the same system Citroën uses on the C4 Aircross). It even has a wading depth of 54cm. That’s not the most impressive wading depth but, still, what a mighty achievement.

Images one to five courtesy of Bonhams.