Our Thursday series, as always, is Showroom and Tell, a weekly trip to a Leith dealership where we throw a spotlight on one car that consistently draws people to it in the showroom. People find themselves in showrooms for any number of reasons—picking up a relative or friend, waiting while their car is serviced, shopping for a new vehicle, or perhaps just browsing because it’s fun to do. One vehicle that always catches people’s eyes while they wait, however, is the Rolls-Royce Wraith, reborn in 2013 after a two-year run in 1938-1939.
Rolls-Royce is a brand that many of us know only vaguely because it belongs to an echelon of the world that few are members of. We like the story of a recent survivor of a brain tumor who was offered the chance to ride with a friend in the Wraith down the coast of California from San Francisco to Los Angeles. The friend, a New York Times journalist, writes:
“The car is the very embodiment of excess, yet ultimately we felt fortunate to be among the few people to experience it, particularly on such a spectacular drive.
“At one point, Jack, who too often these days can’t access the names of familiar things, deftly summed up the experience. ‘I know it’s just a car,’ he said. ‘But when you’re driving a Rolls-Royce, it makes you feel good about your life.’ ”
The ability of a car to give positive feelings to its passengers is a rare and elusive attribute, one that few automakers claim alongside the normal things of horsepower and LED lights. Yet the Wraith offers a new entrance to Rolls-Royce in a way that upholds the solidity of its English heritage while modernizing it simultaneously.
The rear-hinged doors swing forth like tablets of stone from Mt. Sinai itself thanks to internal motors operated by surreptitious push-buttons. When both doors open at once the effect is like a swan unfurling its wings with multi-layered dignity. A crystal rotary knob at the driver’s hand raises the Rolls-Royce hood ornament like an airliner lifting itself above the clouds. The wheel crests right themselves automatically so that the emblem is never upside down. The floor is lined with lamb’s wool, an incalculably plush and landscaped fur that makes you want to stride across fields and valleys for acres. And the starlight, the starlight is something no one else can boast.
The starlight roof entitles you to more than 1,300 hand-cut LED fiber-optic pinpoints of twinkling wonder that transport you into unsullied night sky. Because each optic is cut by hand, the depth and intensity of each beacon is different, just like all stars have different degrees of brightness.
In short, the Wraith is unlike anything you’ve ever driven. It’s a rare experience, as the journalist above noted, one that few will ever know. Its curious transformative property, however, will be noted by whomever is fortunate enough to inhabit the vault-like recesses of its cabin. We highly recommend.