This Bonkers 19-Foot Rolls-Royce Boat Tail May Be the Most Expensive New Car in History-sugar snake
The Story Behind Rolls-Royce’s New $28 Million Hand-Built Boat Tail
The Boat Tail is quite a sensory feast. This latest project by Rolls-Royce is one of only three commissioned nautical inspired custom-built motor cars. Walking around its elongated silhouette, the body appears as a singular clear surface, uninterrupted by panel breaks. At the rear, the sailing boat theme becomes clear. With a press of a button, in a gesture inspired by architect Santiago Calatrava’s cantilever concepts, the deck opens in a theatrically sweeping butterfly form to reveal an intricate hosting suite complete with a bespoke champagne chest, two bottles of Armand de Brignac vintage cuvée, caviar and blinis. Finally, cocktail tables open on either side of the deck providing access to a couple of picnic stools. The Boat Tail is all about these unexpected pleasures.
“It exists far beyond a mere means of transport,” says Alex Innes, head of Rolls-Royce Coachbuild design as he guides me around the car in a sealed off section at the company’s UK plant in Goodwood. “The Boat Tail is not about reaching a destination,” he smiles, “it is the destination itself.” He opens the ceremonial coach doors and I peek inside. The space is neatly tailored and is a temple of ideas. You can feel the reassuring presence of the human hand and eye here. The Boat Tail is a stylistic tour de force and it is viscerally exhilarating. I cannot think of a better experience to end months of lockdown and, at least for a fleeting moment, lift the dark clouds of this pandemic.
The idea of reviving Rolls-Royce’s coachbuilding heritage started four years ago with the hand built Sweptail. Customers began enquiring about similar one-off commissions, so the marque decided on setting-up a specialist Rolls-Royce Coachbuild division. The Boat Tail we see here is the first to be born out of this new venture with an estimated price of around £20m ($28m) although naturally, due to the client’s privacy, the maker won’t confirm this.
The nautical design theme, I’m told, was client-driven. Three of the customers who had approached Rolls-Royce following the Sweptail reveal shared a love for contemporary boat design and in particular J-Class yachts for their purity of form and expression and high levels of craftsmanship. This was timely since Innes and his design team had long wanted to re-imagine the Rolls-Royce boat tail typology, a legacy that saw coachbuilders graft the hull forms of sailing boats onto the rolling chassis of the car. And they all came to an agreement that the three cars would share the same body, but each would be individually crafted to reflect their owners’ personalities.
Coachbuilding is as much about the product as the process - and it can be highly intimate. Innes explains that his team will set out to understand the client’s world, how they live, what they like and dislike, the way they celebrate, what and who they surround themselves with. Then there is the broader cultural context such as what’s happening in the arts, design and architecture — even hospitality.
Innes is reluctant to reveal much about the client of the Boat Tail before me other than the couple’s love of the color blue, fondness for long road trips and that they have a 1932 Rolls-Royce Boat Tail in their collection. The new car’s nautical rear is a contemporary take on the classic. For instance, the aft deck is a modern interpretation of the wooden rear decks of the 1932 car to include large swathes of wood. Caleidolegno veneer — the grey and black material typically housed in the interior — has been specially adapted to be used on the exterior. The open-pore material features a linear wood grain which is visually elongated by brushed stainless steel pinstripe inlays, serving as an optical nod to the typical wooden construction of yachts.
“The client would talk about shared experiences and a sense of occasion,” Innes recalls of the numerous briefings they had in the four-year development time. This is what led to the rear hosting area — the Calatrava-inspired theatrical picnic area. “The idea is that the car hosts you,” he smiles.
We move to the front of the car. All Rolls-Royces have presence, but here the pantheon grille has been deconstructed into the car for an altogether softer appearance to the usual formal expression. “The iconography, the familiarity and the bone structure are all there, but it significantly lessens the formality which is important since this is a driver’s car,” says Innes. To balance this, the headlights have a strong horizontal graphic with deep-set daytime running lights for what appears like heavy brow-lines to frame classical round headlamps. At the rear, the horizontal shape is emphasized with wide, deep-set lamps — a different expression to the marque’s usual vertical lamp iconography.
The Boat Tail is 5.8 meters long which serves to highlight the unusual boat tail design. “The calm simplicity of the surfaces is purposeful as we wanted the impact to come through the overall grandeur and scale,” explains Innes. “Everything else, we felt, could hang off that in terms of characterization,” he says adding: “It is modest in terms of its stylistic expression.” Nautical references are therefore more suggestive in profile. The wrap-around windscreen, for instance, recalls the visor on motor launches, while the gentle rearward lean of the A-pillar, the large, crisp volumes at the front and the tapered end have a gesture that, Innes explains, recalls a motor launch rising out of water under power. Elsewhere, a progressive negative sculpture in the lower bodyside offers a supple impression and is a reference to the running boards of prominent heritage Rolls-Royce designs.
Inside the notes are pitch perfect. The cabin is lapped in luxury with every element meticulously crafted without being overwhelming. Sumptuous leather swathes the seats and doors while crafted wood and polished metal elements offer sensory engagement. There is a distinct appreciation of the qualities of light, proportion, and materials here with subtle nautical references throughout. For instance, blue is woven at a 55-degree angle into the technical fiber elements to be seen on the lower bodywork and orientated to emulate the spill of a water’s wake.
The minimalist fascia highlights the BOVET 1822 — the Swiss watchmaker was commissioned to make a special timepiece for this car. The instrument panel dials are adorned with the Guilloché decorative technique used by fine jewelers and watchmakers, while the slim rimmed two-tone steering wheel continues the blue theme. And since collecting pens is another of the clients’ passions, a cherished Montblanc sits in a hand-crafted aluminum and leather case in the glove box.
Reviving coachbuilding makes absolute sense for Rolls-Royce since the marque has a rich history of hand crafting customized motor cars. And the Goodwood plant is well-appointed, with its advanced technology, highly skilled artisans and crafts people and with access to artist and creatives from outside the auto world.
Coachbuilt cars do not date, they do not get torn apart and recycled. Rather, they are passed on through generations and become part of the narrative of design history. As the antithesis of mass manufacturing, coachbuilding sits at the pinnacle of luxury – a space Rolls-Royce would like to maintain as we navigate the new age of the automobile. And because of the time, skills and effort put into these singular projects, they can lead to unexpected and imaginative design solutions.
Like the Sweptail, the Boat Tail salutes the golden age of coachbuilding, the period in the late 1920s and early 30s when the project was often as much about the motor cars as the personalities who commissioned them. There are so many, but I’m particularly fond of the story of the 1926 Phantom I Brougham De Ville — or “The Phantom Of Love” as it became known. It was built for Clarence Warren Gasque, an American businessman of French ancestry living in London, as a gift to his heiress wife Maude. Gasque wished for a lavish interior to emulate the Rococo ambience of a salon in the Palace of Versailles, with polished satinwood veneer paneling, Aubusson tapestries and a painted ceiling inspired by one of Marie Antoinette’s chairs, complete with a French Ormolu clock mounted on the partition between the front and rear cabins.
“We really wanted the Boat Tail to point to our future,” Innes tells me as we begin to wrap up. “These projects can sometimes be too biased towards history. While the notion of hand built Rolls-Royces is significant to us, we want the design to boldly point towards the future and Coachbuild has offered us the freedom to move beyond the usual constraints".
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