Rolls Royce Ghost Series II: The car of many colours that can do many amazing things

Close your eyes and think of a Rolls-Royce. We’ll wait. Back? Good. What colour did you imagine your Roller to be? A classic bronze? Metallic dark grey? Perhaps a smart, dark blue?

Now take a breath, reset your mind and take another look at the pictures on this page — the pictures that most likely prompted you to pause and read these words. You see banana yellow. Powder blue. Amethyst purple. Salmon pink. Lime green. And all that before you’ve even opened the door of a new Rolls-Royce Ghost Series II.

These colours are no accident — not least because the ultra-luxury paint finish on these cars can require up to 20 coats. The colours are a statement: Rolls-Royce in 2025 isn’t serving up some post-Imperial fantasy offering a throwback to past glories. These are cars for today, tomorrow and the decades beyond. Rolls-Royces have been hauled by their 6.75-litre V12 engines into the 2020s and beyond — and there’s no going back.

This very much includes the Ghost, arguably the most ‘Rolls-Roycey’ of Rolls-Royces. The Spectre and the Cullinan have the electric vehicle and SUV angles covered; the Phantom is the vast luxury barge in which you’d want to be chauffeured around. However, the Ghost — or the Ghost Series II, as it is now — is the Roller that is engineered to be equally a driver’s car and a passenger’s delight.

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For this is the Rolls that does everything. It’s the Rolls that can jump from sporty to statesmanlike and back, depending on who sits behind the wheel and who is in the back seat. The danger of being all things to all Rolls-Royce-owning people is that it might sit too much in the middle. The Ghost is less instantly striking than the rakish Spectre, less imposing than the gargantuan Phantom and dwarfed by the Cullinan, a car so vast it has its own gravitational field. Does that mean it could get lost, at least in a car park full of Rollses? It might do in anonymous slate grey, but it certainly won’t if you order a colour bright enough to negate the need for headlights.

Obviously, this car does have headlights and just as well, too, because they’re one of many design changes that this new Series II iteration of the Ghost shows off. It’s full of clever touches and design cues: the coach line goes all the way from the headlamps to the exhaust; the 22in wheels fill the arches; the lines of the roof swoops down so gracefully that you could almost mistake the car for a coupé; and the classic Rolls-Royce grill curves seamlessly into the bodywork in a manner so pleasing it’s almost enough to prompt you to push the button to hide the Spirit of Ecstasy beneath the bonnet. Almost. But not quite.

Open the doors and step within and the Ghost is as much of a joy as you’d expect. I’ve never scrunched the fur of a snow leopard or a polar bear, but I’ll wager that neither could be thicker, whiter nor softer than the carpets in a Rolls. Although my time on classic sailing yachts has been limited to date (0hr 0min, as you ask), I’d be stunned if the immaculate woodwork of even the most beautifully honed hull was a match for the interior trim produced by Goodwood’s finest carpenters. Even the seat fabric is almost comically over-engineered: naturally, you can order any material you like, but the Ghost Series II has a new option in the shape of the ‘Duality Twill’ fabric, created with 11 miles of thread and 2.2 million stitches.

Opt for a sportier Black Badge model — and most customers do these days — and you will start to realise how the starting price of a Ghost isn’t far short of £300,000 (and that’s before the Bespoke team gets to work on speccing up your particular model). If you can dream it up, Rolls-Royce will almost certainly be able to make it happen, whether it’s a custom constellation for the car’s ‘Starlight Headliner’, a holographic paint finish or a request for a wood dashboard in an endangered tree species so rare that you’ll have to wait for a tree to fall down on a remote island on the other side of the world. For the avoidance of doubt, these are very real examples.

All this leaves one as-yet-unanswered question: how is the Ghost Series II to drive? The simple answer is that it’s effortless. The aforementioned 6.75-litre engine produces about 560bhp, enough to propel this 2½-ton car to 60mph in less than five seconds.

Yet such figures don’t tell the true story: this isn’t a car to thrash the life out of, not least because you simply won’t need to. Peak torque — acceleration, effectively — is reached at only 1,600rpm, which is barely more than engine tick-over. It makes for a car so quiet, smooth and powerful that you feel as if you’re wafting along on a breeze rather than darting, squirting and pressing a car into going ever faster. That makes the speed deceptive, but you needn’t worry about handling: the Ghost’s Planar suspension dampens every bump in the road to an almost unnerving degree, creating the ‘magic-carpet’ ride that’s been the marque’s signature since as far back as anyone can remember.

Even cleverer is the automatic gearbox, which — and we’re in the realms of sci-fi here — is linked to GPS and road data to see what sort of incline, curves and road conditions lie ahead of you, in order to amend the transmission settings to match the road, as if you’re sailing a yacht that’s capable of smoothing out the sea ahead. It might be the crazy colours and design touches that first scream modernity from this newest iteration of the classic Rolls-Royce recipe, but make no mistake: this really is the car it claims to be.