Few brands are as closely associated with the idea of “luxury” as Rolls-Royce, a car manufacturer so fancy schmancy that the company’s official website doesn’t even bother to list how much the things it sells are. Rolls-Royce knows that for anyone serious about buying one of their automobiles, price is not a concern. And to be clear, what you can get for said insane amount of money is likewise insane in customization, which we’re going to now talk about because it’s a lot more interesting, and occasionally bizarre, than even we originally thought when dreaming up this topic.

But in any event, to this end, Rolls-Royce, who as a company can be fairly certain that the average person strolling into one of their showrooms likely has a credit card with a limit rivalling the GDP of a small nation, offers clients a level of customisation and self-expression seldom seen outside of old episodes of Pimp My Ride or the Need For Speed games to the point that literally every every car they sell is one of a kind. Or as we like to call the brand- Billionaire Build a Bear.

One thing we should clarify first though is that even with a luxury brand like Rolls-Royce there are levels to the fanciness on offer with the price increasing accordingly. Now, we know we said in the introduction that Rolls-Royce themselves don’t list how much their cars cost because that would be tacky and only for plebians, but it’s not hard to find out how much they sell for by consulting things like trade magazines or browsing the secondary market.

With this in mind the least you’d be looking to spend on a new Rolls-Royce is about £250,000 (about $310,000) for a stock Rolls-Royce Ghost which online auction site Auto Trader describes as the brand’s “entry level model”. Meanwhile a Rolls-Royce Phantom will set you back a cool £350,000 (about $450,000). If this is too rich for your blood, older models, like from the 70’s, sometimes pop up for sale for as little as £10,000 (about $12,000). As good a deal as this may sound be warned, older models of many luxury cars are very often a huge pain in the butt to fix and maintain, with collectors frequently bemoaning that you can easily spend more than a car’s listed value, just to get it to run
But who cares if a car runs, as long as it’s flashing you are extremely wealthy and not at all an effort to compensate for your insecurities….

Moving on, while these prices give us a good baseline for what a Rolls-Royce would cost you, the company is keenly aware that nobody with Rolls-Royce money is looking to buy a stock model to drive around in. They want to show that crap off like their trophy wife who definitely is with them because they love them.

As such, while the cost of a base model of each car the company sells is easy enough to find, the real cost can balloon to several times that when you take into account all of the extra stuff the company offers prospective clients.

So how about an example.

Let’s start with perhaps the single simplest thing to pick from when buying a car. The colour. Which according to Nick Osy de Zegwart, a bespoke sales manager for the brand, notes as being generally the first thing he’ll discuss with a customer. With that in mind how many options do you think seem reasonable? 50? 100? 1000?

Well, take that last number and multiply it by 40 because as standard Rolls-Royce offers customers a choice from a selection of over 44,000 different colour swatches. Keep in mind, these are the default choices the company offers and, if you so choose, you can just make up your own colour with the company offering a bespoke colour matching service where a member of their design team will create a custom colour based on any item or object you can think of. As an idea of how specific this service is, the company, when prodded, has admitted to colour-matching a car to a client’s dog. Specifically an Irish Setter, which the company notes was not harmed during the colour matching process. Dogs aside, other objects the company has matched the colour of cars to include one client’s favourite shoe, a shade of lipstick and in one case, a rubber glove the buyer just really liked the colour of… We don’t want to know….

The colour can be further customised with a variety of finishes. These range from standard rich people stuff like microscopic flakes of gold or crushed pearl to make it shine to specially engineered super-paint capable of reflecting light in every colour of the visible spectrum. In regards to the last one, that’s not hyperbole with the company reportedly spending in excess of a year developing a literal one-of-a-kind paint they dubbed “Lunaflair” for a single client whose only prompt was that they wanted the colour of their car to resemble an optical phenomenon called the lunar halo, an eerily beautiful and rare optical illusion caused by the “refraction of moonlight from ice crystals in the upper atmosphere”. An effect paint engineers at Rolls-Royce were ultimately able to replicate after, as noted, a year of solid experimentation. Which means that the actual list of colours a client can choose from is theoretically infinite as the engineers in charge of the process are seemingly skilled enough to colour match vague abstract concepts.

Once a client decides on a colour or even the inspiration for a colour, Rolls-Royce will then patent the steps that led to its creation so that nobody else can use it. At least not without asking first with the company noting that anybody wanting to use the same custom colour as another needs their written permission to do so.

To ensure the colour matches exactly and that nothing contaminates it the people tasked with ultimately painting a given car aren’t allowed to wear makeup and are only permitted to wear a specific brand of deodorant provided by Rolls-Royce.

But we’re not even done with colour yet because something the Rolls-Royce Commissioning Suite, where a bunch of these initial decisions are made, contains is a special light custom made for the purpose capable of replicating the exact way and angle the sun shines in different regions of the world. This light will then be shone onto a model Rolls-Royce painted in whatever shade the customer requests so that they can see what the car would look like sitting on their own driveway, wherever that happens to be.
While selecting the colour they want their motorcar to be (as a brand this is near exclusively how Rolls-Royce refers to the vehicles it sells because “car” would be too common we guess) customers can also decide whether or not they’d like their purchase to sport a coachline when it’s finished. Deceptively simple looking, this aesthetic addition is literally the final touch added to the vehicle and at the time of writing this script, every single one is painted by a single guy. Mark Court.

A man who cut his teeth painting the signs that appear outside of pubs, Court reputedly has the steadiest hand of any man in Britain and is so trusted by the brand that he is allowed to paint each line freehand. A final flourish of skill akin to a painter signing their latest masterpiece. As with everything else on the car, this coachline can be tailored to the customer’s liking and it’s common for designers to incorporate elements of the buyer’s personality into the finished product. This can be as simple as stylised initials or as complex as a perfect replica of the owner’s family crest. As you might imagine, a lot of people buying these things have family crests because, sure, why not?

This said, while the coachline is seen as a symbol of the brand, customers don’t necessarily have to have one added because, well, it is their car after all. However, if at any point the customer changes their mind about this, Rolls-Royces will fly Mark out, anywhere in the world, to add it. This is in keeping with the company’s ethos of luxury being synonymous with service and it will similarly fly out engineers to fix faults at the customer’s convenience if they so desire.

But back to Mark Court- the level of trust placed in him is inordinate and it’s noted that if, at any point, he made a mistake, the entire car would need to be sandblasted back to stock and entirely repainted. When asked about the pressures of this and whether or not he’s ever made a mistake Court’s response in a company video released in 2019 was simply -“I don’t make mistakes. I work for Rolls-Royce.”

Moving to the interior of the car, this is similarly customised entirely to the customers tastes and whims with virtually every aspect of the interior being customisable in some way, shape or form. Again, the colour of everything can be bespoke and made to match either the outside of the car or whatever the customer fancies.

Now we know what you’re thinking, surely there’s a limit to this, right? Like Rolls-Royce does have a reputation to maintain at the end of the day and surely they’d step in or tastefully try to steer a customer in another direction if they started asking for stuff that would look fugly. Well apparently not with the previously quoted Nick Osy de Zegwart stating as much in an interview in 2016. Specifically de Zegwart, when asked to comment on any “strange combinations” of colour and style he’d seen noted flatly – “We’re not the taste police.”

Adding that each bespoke Rolls-Royce is “an expression of one’s personality”, which means that whatever the customer wants, the customer gets. To this end some of the weirder things Rolls-Royce have included in the interior of vehicles they’ve made include a speedometer in the backseat so the customer could ensure their driver wasn’t speeding, a cigar humidifier and a cup holder.

If that last one doesn’t sound impressive we should clarify that this was a special cup holder specifically designed to carry the customer, a sumo wrestler’s, favourite brand of drink. Which the company ensured would fit exactly by flying to Japan, buying one and then tailoring the cup holder to its exact measurements.

Keeping with the interior, most stock Rolls-Royce models come with leather seats as standard. Which sounds far too pedestrian and it probably won’t surprise you to learn that the leather seats in a Rolls-Royce are a literal cut above the fare offered in other cars. For starters Rolls-Royce only uses leather sources from bulls.

Why?

Well leather from a bull is generally less prone to imperfections owing to the fact bulls can’t get pregnant, which means their skin doesn’t typically get stretch marks. Likewise, bulls destined to cushion the buttholes of occasional assholes are raised in high altitude environments as such places tend to have less biting insects which could, again, impact the ultimate quality of leather made from the animals they bite. Even with all of these measures taken though sometimes there are issues, even if the imperfections are literally unobservable to the human eye and only visible on spectrometer tests the company conducts, because of course they do. In these cases, Rolls-Royce will discard the leather. With the company famously selling leather that doesn’t meet its exacting standards to the high-end fashion industry.

For customers who don’t want to sit on part of the corpse of a cow, other options for interiors include goat, ostrich and a number of artificial options. Though ultimately the interior can be made from whatever material a customer wishes. Even if said material is illegal, though for this one Rolls Royce won’t be involved for legal reasons.

But it turns out when researching, we stumbled across an article from 2021 about a Rolls-Royce that was seized by Italian authorities sporting crocodile leather seats sourced from an endangered example of the species. To be clear, Rolls-Royce does offer crocodile leather as an option, but this particular car had seats made from a special kind of crocodile you’re very specifically not allowed to turn into a car headrest. Noteworthy, however, according to the Financial Express, these modifications were made after the car was purchased from Rolls-Royce, who as a rule, do not offer such options making this one of the few requests the company will not comply with while crafting a bespoke vehicle. However, the fact the owner’s response to being told no was to immediately get an aftermarket dealer to install them anyway just goes to show that nothing is off limits when it comes to customising one of these cars if you’re rich enough. We’re just glad Hannibal Lector never had a taste for these vehicles…

Keeping with the seats even the thread used to stitch the leather is customisable and as with everything else, Rolls-Royce keeps a huge number of options on hand. Again though this is only a baseline and the thread can be whatever colour the customer wants to the point that Rolls-Royce once spent a year developing a new type of thread that was the exact same shade of candy apple red as a car’s exterior after a customer complained none of the default red options on offer looked red enough.

Moving onto panelling, this is also entirely customised to the buyer’s own tastes, though there are some caveats the company has to make for the sake of safety. For example there’s an oft repeated story about the company taking a tree on a customer’s property that was struck by lightning and incorporating that into stuff like the dashboard. This is true, though the process to do so was more of a pain in the butt than you’d expect because the company had to perform things like stress and impact tests on the parts they constructed from the wood to ensure it adhered to industry-wide safety standards. Tests that were difficult to ensure were done properly with the finite amount of material the company had available. Difficult, but not impossible with the company eventually being able to do exactly as the customer asked and fold wood from their beloved tree into the car’s interior.

One of the more notable things sported by high-end Rolls-Royces is what’s called the Starlight Headliner, essentially a constellation of glittering stars woven into the car roof interior. In reality these “stars” are created by a series of fiber optic lights painstakingly woven into the interior and powered by over 2km of cables discreetly hidden away in the car’s bodywork. This constellation is, you guessed it, entirely bespoke and can be reflective of the night sky from any place and time on Earth. Just tell the team where and when you want the stars to be from and Rolls-Royce will confirm with an observatory what the stars looked like from the exact spot at the time and weave a facsimile of it into the roof of the interior so that every time you look up, it’s as if you’re looking at the night sky from that time and place. Other options for roof interiors include bespoke embroidery and even artwork, with the company, on at least one occasion, finding a way to put a whole painting into the roof of someone’s car.

To ensure customers can enjoy this luxury in peace without having to hear the ramblings of the plebians on the street, Rolls-Royce cars are crammed full of a pretty extreme amount of sound proofing with the company going out of its way to eliminate every possible source of noise from the obvious stuff like the engine to less obvious things you might not notice but still cause some noise like the squeak of the windshield wiper as it slaps aside water that dare touch the car.

Amusingly the company had to re-engineer their cars after it emerged they were soundproofing the cars too well.

You see, when Rolls-Royce began selling the appropriately named Ghost they were soon inundated with complaints from customers that found the near totally silent ride incredibly off-putting. With the car being so quiet that something as simple as a person adjusting their weight on the seat would sound super noisy in the eerie silence of the interior. To address this engineers removed some soundproofing and worked with acoustic engineers to ensure that the sounds the car did happen to make would harmonize together into a persistent “soft whisper”.

The end result is a car ride so smooth and quiet that Rolls-Royce has admitted that at least one wealthy patron from Asia had an entire bed fitted into the back of their car as it quickly became the one place they could relax and be fairly sure nothing short of a bomb going off would wake them up.

Speaking of which Rolls-Royce can of course be customised to sport defensive options like armour plating, though our queries about whether or not they can add machineguns like that one Aston Martin James Bond drives went unanswered for some reason.
Moving on from there, one of the final things the company does to make sure the car is totally watertight is submit it to monsoon-like conditions by spraying it with several dozen high-pressure jets for several minutes straight at all angles. After this, an engineer armed with an endoscope, you know the thing doctors use to check up your butt for possible medical issues, gives the car a once over. If a single drop of water is found somewhere it shouldn’t be, the entire car will be scrapped and the process of building it will begin again. At least according to company press releases, which we imagine are at least a little embellished for marketing reasons. Afterall, one would presume just fixing the issue that caused the drop to get in would be a bit more economical and faster than making the customer wait for an entirely new build…

But in any event, whilst a car is being built for a customer other options the customer can decide upon include whether or not the final product will sport the brand’s iconic Spirit of Ecstasy hood adornment or a more simple badge. This can again be customised, to an extent, with gold or jewel encrusted options being popular and a rumour that at least one was custom made to make it look as though the Spirit was dunking a basketball for a client who played the sport.

Last, but not least, a customer can customise themselves an umbrella which, as standard, is hidden away inside the door of most stock Rolls-Royce models. It is a British brand after all. As with everything else, customers can remove this option if they wish and have the cavity filled or altered to dispense Pringles or something.

Now, all of this sounds ridiculous but so far we’ve only talked about the base options Rolls-Royce offers because there’s a level beyond even this only offered to those with truly obscene amounts of money. Called Coachbuild, this ultra-exclusive bespoke service literally cannot be bought, with Rolls-Royce only offering it to clients they deem worthy of the absolute highest level of service they offer.

Described by the brand as the “most exclusive division of Bespoke” and the “automotive equivalent of haute couture”, the options afforded to anyone qualifying for this service are truly unlimited with the collaboration between client and brand beginning, to paraphrase Rolls-Royce, from the first line drawn on a sketchpad by one of their “artisans”.
Cars made by this arm of the company can take literal years to produce and each is a bonafide work of automotive art that is, as Rolls-Royce themselves boast -“A truly singular creation.”

Owing to the highly secretive nature of the clients such a service would naturally serve, details not filtered through the company themselves about Coachbuild cars are hard to come by but they very often describe one-of-a-kind details and embellishments. For instance the car we mentioned earlier with the specially-made paint that reflected the sun the same way as an optical phenomenon? That was one of these cars.

Other known Coachbuild cars incorporate similarly outlandish and unique colour-schemes, like the Rolls-Royce La Rose Noire Droptail, a car directly inspired by a single item, the Black Baccara rose. A flower said to be adored by the unnamed matriarch of the family which commissioned the car, which for the curious, took in excess of four years to make.
Which is admittedly impressive, but at the end of the day, it is just a car- a means to get from point A to point B comfortably. A car that likely cost more than most people’s homes and in some cases more than entire blocks of homes. Something the editor of this script, Daven’s, 1987 Toyota Tercel has been doing for him since all the way back in 1995 and still going strong with that sweet, sweet old car smell mixed with mild oil fumes from the exhaust, and a ceiling panel that may not have stars, but does definitely constitute a ceiling panel… despite having long since lost its needless covering fabric. And gas mileage? Please. The average Rolls-Royce absolutely cannot compete at nearly half of the perfection of that sky blue, two door Tercel. Your move Roycey.