Rolls Royce Spent 5 Months to Assemble the Watch Dial, New Rolls-Royce Droptail Arcadia 2024
- 2 months ago
The third of four coachbuilding Droptail commissions required 8,000 hours of work on the wood trim
Even Rolls Royce's entry-level car, the Ghost sedan, will set you back around $350,000, but it looks as ordinary and affordable as a used Corolla next to the Droptail convertible believed to cost more than $30 million.
Only four of the magnificent roadsters are in production, each designed to suit the whims of the (very) wealthy buyer, and Rolls Royce has just unveiled the third in the series. While the earlier Droptail Amethyst featured a moody purple color scheme and the La Rose Noire before it looked like an accessory from a burlesque show, the Droptail Arcadia is like a luxury wellness retreat on wheels, with its calming white paint and earthy wood trim. .
Rolls' craftsmen developed a two-tone color scheme consisting of a flat white base infused with aluminum and glass particles, offset by lower carbon fiber sections painted silver for the first time on a Droptail. But the time that must be spent in the paint shop is nothing compared to the hours spent creating and finishing Arcadia's wood siding.
The car has 233 pieces of wood, 76 of which are on the rear deck alone, and engineers had to use F1 techniques to create a rigid carbon fiber to which the wood could be applied. In total, more than 8,000 hours of development work went into tree-based detailing. And while this was going on, another team was spending five months assembling the most complex clock face ever fitted to a Rolls Royce, having already put two years of development work into the job.
The automaker's claim that " Rolls Royce's standards of testing and verification are higher than those of the watch world " will no doubt rub a few in the horology industry the wrong way; But even those who know nothing about watches (for me) can tell there's something special about, for example, the geometric guilloche pattern of the face with 119 facets. This issue celebrates Rolls' 119 years in the business in 2023, the year the customer first sees a preview of their car.
Source: https://www.carscoops.com/2024/02/rolls-royce-spent-5-months-assembling-the-clock-face-in-the-arcadia-droptail/
Even Rolls Royce's entry-level car, the Ghost sedan, will set you back around $350,000, but it looks as ordinary and affordable as a used Corolla next to the Droptail convertible believed to cost more than $30 million.
Only four of the magnificent roadsters are in production, each designed to suit the whims of the (very) wealthy buyer, and Rolls Royce has just unveiled the third in the series. While the earlier Droptail Amethyst featured a moody purple color scheme and the La Rose Noire before it looked like an accessory from a burlesque show, the Droptail Arcadia is like a luxury wellness retreat on wheels, with its calming white paint and earthy wood trim. .
Rolls' craftsmen developed a two-tone color scheme consisting of a flat white base infused with aluminum and glass particles, offset by lower carbon fiber sections painted silver for the first time on a Droptail. But the time that must be spent in the paint shop is nothing compared to the hours spent creating and finishing Arcadia's wood siding.
The car has 233 pieces of wood, 76 of which are on the rear deck alone, and engineers had to use F1 techniques to create a rigid carbon fiber to which the wood could be applied. In total, more than 8,000 hours of development work went into tree-based detailing. And while this was going on, another team was spending five months assembling the most complex clock face ever fitted to a Rolls Royce, having already put two years of development work into the job.
The automaker's claim that " Rolls Royce's standards of testing and verification are higher than those of the watch world " will no doubt rub a few in the horology industry the wrong way; But even those who know nothing about watches (for me) can tell there's something special about, for example, the geometric guilloche pattern of the face with 119 facets. This issue celebrates Rolls' 119 years in the business in 2023, the year the customer first sees a preview of their car.
Source: https://www.carscoops.com/2024/02/rolls-royce-spent-5-months-assembling-the-clock-face-in-the-arcadia-droptail/