Rolls-Royce Motor Cars PressClub · Article.
ROLLS-ROYCE ANNOUNCES BLACK BADGE GHOST THE PUREST BLACK BADGE YET
28.10.2021 Press Release
Rolls-Royce announces a product that represents a new kind of Black Badge motor car. Their most advanced motor car yet has been reengineered to characterise the alter ego of Rolls-Royce: assertive, dynamic and potent. This is the purest Black Badge motor car in the marque’s history. This is Black Badge Ghost.
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Georgina Cox
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars
This article in other PressClubs
- Black Badge Ghost debuts dark side of Post Opulent design
- 6.75-litre V12 engine now delivers increased power (600PS) and torque (900NM)
- Drivetrain and chassis re-engineered for more urgent performance
- Curated collection debuts striking Turchese Leather and Technical Carbon veneer
- Bespoke alloy wheel introduced in Black Badge house style with carbon fibre barrel
- Infinity lemniscate symbol continues to codify noir expression of Rolls-Royce
“After considerable internal debate, Rolls-Royce announced
that it would create an officially sanctioned response to a new kind
of client: a permanent Bespoke treatment to its motor cars named
Black Badge. These products, which were launched in 2016, would be
darker in aesthetic, more urgent in personality and dramatic in
material treatment.
“In the five years since Black Badge became publicly available,
this bold family of motor cars has come to symbolise the pinnacle of
a new type of super-luxury product, setting in motion a shift across
the wider luxury industry. Subsequently, nearly all luxury makers
create products that seek to capture the Black Badge spirit.
“Today, we announce a product that represents a new kind of Black
Badge motor car, one that seizes on the minimalist, Post Opulent
design treatment that has recast the legend of Ghost but amplifies
and subverts it with the application of black. Our most advanced
motor car yet has been reengineered to characterise the alter ego of
Rolls-Royce: assertive, dynamic and potent. This is the purest Black
Badge motor car in the marque’s history. This is Black Badge Ghost.”
Torsten Müller-Ötvös, Chief Executive Officer, Rolls-Royce
Motor Cars
INTRODUCTION
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars has a unique fluency in its clients. Its
close relationship with the women and men who patronise the marque
affords the company’s decision-makers an unparalleled understanding of
the super-luxury consumer: their aesthetic preferences, uncompromising
lifestyle requirements and changing taste patterns. Only with this
understanding, and briefings supplied by the brand's Luxury
Intelligence Unit, is the marque able to create an accurate product
response. Black Badge is a vivid example of this.
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars has always attracted subversive clients –
rebellious women and men who built their success by breaking rules,
taking risks and challenging conventions. In the 2020s, these women
and men engage with luxury products on their own terms. They reject
suits for streetwear, use blockchain not banks and influence the
analogue world through their digital endeavours. In doing so, they
have created new codes of luxury that resonate with their
sensibilities: darker in aesthetic, assertive in character and bold in design.
Their approach to Rolls-Royce products is no different. The
marque has responded accordingly, developing new colour palettes, more
technical surface treatments and even more powerful driving
experiences without ever compromising the effortless sensibilities
that have drawn this bold group of clients to the Rolls-Royce brand.
Black Badge, the highly successful alter ego of Rolls-Royce, now
represents more than 27% of commissions worldwide and is codified by
the mathematical symbol that represents a potential infinity, which is
found within the motor car’s interior. This graphic, also known as the
Lemniscate, was applied to Sir Malcolm Campbell’s record-breaking
Rolls-Royce-powered Blue Bird K3 hydroplane and the marque's designers
nominated this hallmark for Black Badge motor cars to reflect their
own unrelenting pursuit of power.
Rolls-Royce debuted Black Badge with Wraith and Ghost in 2016,
followed by Dawn in 2017 then Cullinan in 2019. Today, a new, Post
Opulent expression of Black Badge joins the family. The purest and
most technologically advanced Black Badge motor car yet, Black Badge Ghost.
THE DARK SIDE OF POST OPULENCE
Conceived in response to a group of clients who requested a
Rolls-Royce that was agile, discreet, highly connected and free of any
superfluous design, the new Ghost is not just the most technologically
advanced Rolls-Royce yet, but also the most aesthetically pure. In the
twelve months since this motor car has been available, it has become
one of the fastest-selling products in the marque’s history,
representing more than 3,500 commissions worldwide.
This motor car also started a new design conversation in its
relentless pursuit of minimalism and purity. Named ‘Post Opulence’ by
Rolls-Royce designers, this aesthetic movement is characterised by
reduction and substance. In service to this, exceptional materials are
selected and celebrated while overt design is limited, intelligent and unobtrusive.
However, within this group of clients – who celebrate minimalism
and material substance – a rebellious subset sought to create a
disruptive expression of Ghost by permanently cloaking it in a shade
so pure that its very classification as a colour remains a subject of
debate: black. Black Badge Ghost reflects these clients’ desires. It
is the dark side of Post Opulence: minimalism in extremis.
EXTERIOR
Clients are free to select any of the marque’s 44,000
‘ready-to-wear’ colours or create their own entirely unique Bespoke
hue. However, the overwhelming majority of women and men who requested
this darker expression of Ghost have selected the signature Black. To
create what is the motor car industry’s darkest black, 100lbs (45kg)
of paint is atomised and applied to an electrostatically charged body
in white before being oven dried. The motor car then receives two
layers of clear coat before being hand-polished by a team of four
craftsman to produce the marque’s signature high-gloss piano finish.
At between three and five hours in duration, this operation is
entirely unknown in mass production, creating an intensity simply
unattainable elsewhere in the automotive industry. It is this depth of
darkness that serves as the perfect canvas for clients to add a
high-contrast, hand-painted Coachline, which has done much to create
the Black Badge ‘black and neon’ aesthetic that has come to
characterise this vivid family of Rolls-Royce motor cars.
To match this dramatic coachwork, the marque’s Bespoke
Collective of designers, engineers and craftspeople collaborated to
create an entirely customisable process that allows Rolls-Royce
hallmarks such as the high-polished Spirit of Ecstasy and Pantheon
Grille to be subverted. Instead of simply painting these components, a
specific chrome electrolyte is introduced to the traditional chrome
plating process that is co-deposited on the stainless-steel substrate,
darkening the finish. Its final thickness is just one micrometre –
around one hundredth of the width of a human hair. Each of these
components is precision-polished by hand to achieve a mirror-black
chrome finish before it is fitted to the motor car.
The exterior treatment resolves with a Bespoke 21-inch composite
wheelset. Designed in the Black Badge house style and reserved for
Black Badge Ghost, the barrel of each wheel is made up of 22 layers of
carbon fibre laid on three axes, then folded back on themselves at the
outer edges of the rim, forming a total of 44 layers of carbon fibre
for greater strength. A 3D-forged aluminium hub is bonded to the rim
using aerospace-grade titanium fasteners and finished with the
marque’s hallmark Floating Hubcap, ensuring the Double R monogram
remains upright at all times. To celebrate the material substance and
remarkable surface effect, a lightly tinted lacquer is applied to
protect the finish but still allow clients to observe the technical
complexity of the wheels unique carbon fibre construction.
INTERIOR
Advanced luxury materials have been meticulously created and
crafted for a unique ambience in the interior suite. While recalling
the dramatic mechanical intent of Black Badge Ghost, the materials are
true to Ghost’s Post Opulent design philosophy – one defined by
authenticity and material substance rather than overt statement. In
this spirit, a complex but subtle weave that incorporates a deep
diamond pattern rendered in carbon and metallic fibres has been
created by the marque’s craftspeople.
Multiple wood layers are pressed onto the interior component
substrates, using black Bolivar veneer for the uppermost base layer.
This forms a dark foundation for the Technical Fibre layers that
follow. Leaves woven from resin-coated carbon and contrasting
metal-coated thread laid in a diamond pattern are applied by hand to
the components in perfect alignment, creating a three-dimensional
effect. To secure this extraordinary veneer, each component is cured
for one hour under pressure at 100°C. This is then sand-blasted to
create a keyed surface for six layers of lacquer, which is hand-sanded
and polished before being incorporated into the motor car.
If specified in the client’s commission, the Technical Fibre
‘Waterfall’ section of the individual rear seats receives the Black
Badge family motif: the mathematical symbol that represents potential
infinity known as a Lemniscate. Rendered in aerospace-grade aluminium
on the lid of Black Badge Ghost’s Champagne cooler, it is applied
between the third and fourth layer of a total of six layers of subtly
tinted lacquer, creating the illusion that the symbol is floating
above the Technical Fibre veneer.
Aesthetes from the marque’s design team elected to further
enhance the noir ambience of Black Badge Ghost by subduing the
brightwork. Air vent surrounds on the dashboard and in the rear cabin
are darkened using physical vapour deposition, one of the few methods
of colouring metal that ensures parts will not discolour or tarnish
over time or through repeated use. The Post Opulent principles of
simplicity have also been applied to dramatic effect in the Black
Badge Ghost timepiece design: only the tips of the hands and the
twelve, three, six and nine o'clock markers are picked out, in a
subdued chrome finish, creating a remarkably minimal clock. Additional
timepieces are available within Black Badge Ghost to suit the client’s
aesthetic preference.
The timepiece is flanked by a world-first Bespoke innovation
that debuted with Ghost: the Illuminated Fascia, which displays an
ethereal glowing Lemniscate, surrounded by more than 850 stars.
Located on the passenger side of the dashboard, the constellation and
motif are completely invisible when the interior lights are not in
operation. As in Ghost, the Lemniscate motif is illuminated via 152
LEDs mounted above and beneath the fascia, each meticulously
colour-matched to the cabin’s clock and instrument dial lighting. To
ensure the Lemniscate is lit evenly, a 2mm-thick light guide is used,
featuring more than 90,000 laser-etched dots across the surface. This
not only disperses the light evenly but creates a twinkling effect as
the eye moves across the fascia, echoing the subtle sparkle of the
Shooting Star Starlight Headliner.
ENGINEERING
Black Badge is not just an aesthetic – it is an experience. The
clients who requested this motor car demanded that the Bespoke
treatment of Black Badge Ghost extend from the design atelier into the
marque’s engineering department. In doing so, the Bespoke Collective
of designers, engineers and craftspeople collaborated to create a
vivid driving personality that matched Black Badge Ghost’s visual
intent without compromising the marque’s effortless ride proclivities
and exhaustive acoustic tuning.
Key to its potent character is the Architecture of Luxury,
Rolls-Royce’s proprietary all-aluminium spaceframe architecture that
debuted with Phantom. This sub-structure not only delivers
extraordinary body stiffness, but its flexibility and scalability
allowed Ghost to be equipped with all-wheel drive, four-wheel steering
and the award-winning Planar Suspension system. For Black Badge, these
peerless engineering qualities have been comprehensively
re-engineered, including the fitting of more voluminous air springs to
alleviate body roll under more assertive cornering.
The capacity of the Rolls-Royce twin-turbocharged 6.75-litre V12
engine was deemed sufficient. However, the flexibility of this
celebrated power plant has been exploited to generate an extra 29PS,
creating a total output of 600PS. The sense of a single infinite gear
has also been dramatised with the addition of a further 50NM of
torque, for a total of 900NM. The powertrain has also received Bespoke
transmission and throttle treatments to further enhance the engine’s
increased power reserves. The ZF eight-speed gear box and both front-
and rear-steered axles work collaboratively to adjust the levels of
feedback to the driver, depending on throttle and steering inputs.
As with all products in the marque’s Black Badge portfolio, the
‘Low’ button situated on the gear selection stalk unlocks Black Badge
Ghost’s full suite of technologies. This is asserted by the
amplification of the motor car's engine through an entirely new
exhaust system, subtly announcing its potency. All 900NM of torque is
available from just 1700rpm and, once underway in Low Mode, gearshift
speeds are increased by 50% when the throttle is depressed to 90%,
delivering Black Badge Ghost’s abundant power reserves with dramatic immediacy.
To bolster confidence when exploiting Black Badge Ghost, the
braking bite point has been raised and pedal travel decreased.
Non-Black Badge Ghost is provisioned with a robust braking hardware
package that was deemed more than ample under extreme conditions, even
accounting for the Black Badge alter ego’s increased power output.
However, a new suite of bold high-temperature brake calliper paint
colours has been developed in preparation for forthcoming Black Badge
Ghost commissions.
Black Badge Ghost is available to commission now.
CO2 EMISSIONS & CONSUMPTION.
Black Badge Wraith: NEDCcorr (combined) CO2 emission:
367 g/km; Fuel consumption: 17.5 mpg / 16.1 l/100km; WLTP (combined)
CO2 emission: 370-365 g/km; Fuel consumption: 17.2-17.4 mpg /
16.4-16.2 l/100km.
Black Badge Dawn: NEDCcorr (combined) CO2 emission:
371 g/km; Fuel consumption: 17.3 mpg / 16.3 l/100km WLTP (combined)
CO2 emission: 382-380 g/km; Fuel consumption: 16.7-16.9 mpg /
16.9-16.8 l/100km.
Black Badge Cullinan: NEDCcorr (combined) CO2
emission: 341 g/km; Fuel consumption: 18.8 mpg / 15.0 l/100km WLTP
(combined) CO2 emission: 377-355 g/km; Fuel consumption: 17.0-18.1 mpg
/ 16.62-15.6 l/100km.
Black Badge Ghost: NEDCcorr (combined) CO2 emission:
359 g/km; Fuel consumption: 15.8 mpg / 18.0 l/100km. WLTP (combined)
CO2 emission: 359 g/km; Fuel consumption: 17.9 mpg / 15.8 l/100km.