Rolls Royce Ghost Debuts on Premises of Historic Villa d'Este

By Henny Hemmes
Senior European Editor
The Auto Channel

CERNOBBIO, Italy, May 4. On the occasion of the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este, Rolls-Royce brought its brand new Ghost to Italy for its first live performance. The new car, of which the name had been announced a week earlier at the Shanghai motor show, debuted on the grounds of the beautiful historic Villa at Lake Como in Northern Italy.

Earlier this year, I had seen the RR4, the work name for the 2010 Ghost, at a sneak peak event in BMW’s headquarters in Munich, Germany. In Geneva, Rolls showed the 200 EX study, but now the production version was out in the open air, under a sunny sky in Northern Italy.

The luxurious limousine may be dubbed the ‘small Rolls’, it still has a considerable size with a wheel base of nearly 130 inches, alength of 213” and a width and height of nearly 77” and 61” respectively. The Ghost’s heart is the new 507 hp strong 6.6-liter V-12 turbo-engine, that is teamed to a eight-speed automatic ZF-transmission.

The Ghost is the first of the new generation of models that will carry this evocative name and will give us two pinnacle product lines – Phantom and Ghost.

The Rolls-Royce Ghost will be built on its own dedicated production line at the Goodwood facility in the south of England and will share paint, leather and wood workshops with the Phantom series. Rolls-Royce has expanded all areas of its manufacturing facility over the last 18 months to prepare for the introduction of the Ghost model. The new car will go into production by the end of this year.

100th anniversary of Rolls-Royce.
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars CEO, Tom Purves was delighted to bring the car to Italy where it joined the company’s s special Centenary Experimental Car, 100EX, that also made its first outdoor appearance after the world premiere at the Geneva motor show in March. and took part in the Concept Cars and Prototypes Parade on Saturday afternoon - the first time that it was driven publicly. Based on a lightweight aluminium space frame, the open-top, four-seat, two-door drophead 100EX has been designed to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Rolls-Royce, which falls today, May 4th.