A Rolls for proles (part 2)

Newswheel staff :: 05 October 2005 :: Filed under Saloon, Rolls Royce, Europe & UK, US

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£100,000 is quite cheap enough, thank you

Back in May we reported that Rolls Royce was pondering a new product priced at a relatively proletarian £100,000 / $150,000. This week, Autocar magazine has a story which fleshes out some of the details.

The most likely new model is a more compact saloon / coupe pairing based on the Phantom limo’s high-tech aluminium spaceframe chassis and with styling that Rolls’ boss Ian Robertson describes as “less formal.” The philosophy behind this is simple enough. The cars will be designed to take on Bentley’s irritatingly successful Continental GT coupe and the new Continental Flying Spur four door.

All of which would be gravy if it wasn’t for one thing: the new models apparently won’t see the light of day until at least 2009. We fancy Rolls would dearly love to get something out the door much sooner.

For the record, Autocar has some nice-looking computer generated images of the compact saloon this week, but it’s clear that these are speculative – the final design hasn’t been signed off.

Linkage:
Autocar