Rolls-Royce calls the Cullinan Series II, the new version of its 2018 ‘high-sided vehicle’ (read SUV), its ‘most capable’ motorcar. That is an understatement. Rolls-Royces can be understated because they are bespoke and, as such, they are what you want them to be. You are dropping the price of a house on a motorcar, after all – the parallels with sexual longing are obvious, if under-disclosed. For every hot pink, or blush pink, Phantom with an interior ceiling lit up as your late dog’s face or horoscope – they can do this – there is an inky Ghost impersonating Bette Davis’s black silk dress in All About Eve. That’s my Rolls-Royce. Mostly, I like them black and white, like chessboards. But they are infinite.
No one can touch you in a Cullinan. It forgives your sins
Ignore those who call them vulgar: they have never driven, let alone commissioned, one. All things in orange, or purple, or gold, are vulgar. The mood board room at Goodwood is self-aware above all, and Rolls-Royce is owned by BMW, which does not make mistakes. The feeling of driving a Rolls-Royce may not be comfortable ones, unless you are into humiliating Range Rovers, which seem to cower at the Cullinan’s approach, especially in the Cotswolds – never a bad thing. But they are wild, and addictive: I know my drugs, and this is one. The average Rolls-Royce owner has multiple Rolls-Royces – I imagine him in a state of drowsing, perhaps from morphia, willing the car he seeks into being – and the average owner is getting younger every year. Although they are not really owners. They are obsessives, and the Cullinan is now Goodwood’s best-seller. They can’t make them fast enough, and what that says about us I can’t say. Perhaps people are richer, and more frightened, than ever.
The Cullinan has a singular gift: it is the off-road Rolls-Royce, though I don’t know how many of them go off-road. I don’t drive in those circles. Still, they can do it for you: mount glaciers, cross rivers, drive up Mount Snowdon on a whim – what for? – and, unlike, say, the Mercedes G-Wagon, a handsome workhorse, they look surprising doing it. He isn’t here to see it, but the Cullinan II is closest to the weaponised Silver Ghosts T.E. Lawrence used against the Ottoman Turks in the Arabian desert campaign. (They had six cylinders, a 50-horsepower engine, armour-plating and a rotating turret with a Vickers machine gun. They hated mud, loved sand, and returned to fight Mussolini.) I always ask Rolls-Royce about bespoke militarisation, which feels absurd in Ibiza, the venue for the press drive. They always say, at beach or sinuous hotel – not us, we wouldn’t. But once the motorcar leaves Goodwood, who knows what people are capable of?
Eighty years on, and the Cullinan II is more sumptuous than the Silver Ghost. What am I saying? It’s absurd. I still remember the day I first sat in a Rolls-Royce – it was a white Ghost, the purist’s Rolls-Royce – and took off my shoes, sank my feet into lambswool carpet and felt a peace with the world that is quite rare for me. Would this feeling last? I don’t know; I have never owned a car worth more than the petrol inside it. Whatever you think a car makes you feel – I loved my VW Fox, now honourably retired as a courtesy car – this feels better. You may think you hate the rich. This is why. No one can touch you in a Cullinan. It forgives your sins.
It’s tall like a preening London taxi – and there is nothing wrong with that – but what transfixes me is the shine of the paint. I have seen gloss this bright only once: on Elizabeth II’s hearse (Jaguar Land Rover, a nameless maroon). There are changes from the original Cullinan: the wheels are bigger; the grille is illuminated, for ease of looming; the exterior lights lengthened. The dash is digital but looks analogue; there is a new interior fabric called Duality Twill – interlocking Rs in bamboo, I like the name – and a Spirit of Ecstasy, for the first time in Rolls-Royce’s history, inside the car. You can still punch the one on the bonnet, and watch it retreat.
It is surprisingly obedient for a motorcar weighing almost three tonnes, and almost noiseless. They call it the Flying Carpet ride, but that says nothing for its solidity. The Rolls-Royce remains one of the only consumer goods I have ever really wanted. It’s £300,000, or thereabouts.
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