Rolls-Royce’s $400,000 Dawn convertible is a big, beautiful street schooner
Introducing “the sexiest Rolls-Royce ever built” to the automotive press requires careful presentation.
For these jaded journalists, who drift from junket to junket, driving one high-end luxury car after another, the bar is very high.
Some of them were at the Four Seasons in Qatar for the December unveiling of the Lamborghini Huracan 580-2, with meals by Nobu. Others were at the French Alps ski resort at Courchevel in March, dining at the five-star restaurant Lamartine between spins in the Range Rover Evoque convertible.
So, for the West Coast rollout of its $400,000 Dawn convertible, the exclusive English car company created a deftly curated experience that included rooms at the elegant Belmond El Encanto hotel in the hills above Santa Barbara, a catered luncheon in the Santa Ynez Valley at Grassini Family Vineyards and an elaborate multi-course El Encanto dinner accompanied by five of Grassini’s finest vintages.
Oh, and a drive in the Dawn.
The newest car in the Rolls-Royce family is a big, beautiful boat. Powered by a 6.6-liter twin-turbocharged V-12 engine that makes 563 horsepower and 575 pound feet of torque, and weighing in at just under three tons, it is a street schooner designed to sail the Cote d’Azur — or the California coastline.
Meant stylistically to recall the 1953 Silver Dawn drophead — the first Rolls-Royce vehicle built as Britain began to recover from World War II — the new Dawn is long and broad in the beam, with graceful lines that suggest sinuous, sophisticated strength.
On the wine country back roads, gliding between the faux-Danish kitsch of Solvang and the calculated small town charm of Los Olivos, the Dawn was a driving delight — powerful and pleasantly understated.
Rolls-Royce calls it “a sumptuous and sartorial slingshot of wood and leather,” and says the slingshot will accelerate from zero to 60 miles per hour in about 4.9 seconds.
As if to underscore the vast strength of its V-12 engine, the Dawn (like other Rolls-Royces) features a “Power Reserve” gauge instead of a tachometer. In an exploratory mood, I pressed the gas pedal down on a stretch of open road and watched the reserve drop from 90% to 10%. In short order, the Dawn crested 110 miles per hour without showing any sign of struggle, and without visible movement on the gas gauge. (The Dawn gets about 19 miles per gallon when driven judiciously on the highway, and around 14 in the city.)
The acceleration is sure without being scary, and the drive experience is somewhat detached, creating a feeling of floating above the roadway. This motorcar is meant for old-fashioned motoring. With Vivaldi on the Victrola, and the Santa Ynez stables and vineyards sliding by, I was inclined to proceed slowly.
Rolls-Royce asserts that the Dawn is the quietest convertible ever built, and as quiet as its hardtop Wraith. It features a six-layer fabric roof that, when raised, creates none of the wind noise typical of ragtop cars. The mechanism that lowers and raises the roof is so soundless that Rolls calls it a “silent ballet.”
Everything about the Dawn is stately and silent. Even the slowest of the fan settings is marked “Soft” instead of “Low.”
With the top down, the drive is a little noisier, and the enormous rear passenger area — fine, leather-bound acreage that includes its own seat warmers and coolers — is as windy as the back seat of a lesser car.
But Rolls insists it is quite safe. “Should the worst of circumstances arise,” the company says, the Dawn will instantly deploy a concealed “roll-over protection system” to protect car and driver.
Mechanically, the Dawn is very much its own car, not a chopped Wraith or Ghost, not a shrunken Phantom. Rolls says that though it shares design themes with the three other cars in the company lineup, 80% of the parts are specific to the Dawn.
The interior appointments are heavy on select woods, leathers and chrome. The upholstery in the model I drove was clad in a supple, sensuous Mandarin Orange leather that seemed almost edible.
Audiophiles will be pleased to know Dawn’s designers have included “the most exhaustively designed automotive hi-fi system ever developed.” A hidden microphone senses ambient noise and adjusts volume and tone accordingly.
The Dawn is a two-door, but its builders insist it is far from the typical “2+2” convertible that, like the Ford Mustang, Chevrolet Camaro, Buick Cascada or other soft tops, has two seats in front and a cramped afterthought instead of a back seat.
It is more comparable to the Bentley Continental GT, though that drop top doesn’t have quite as much rear passenger space, or Bentley’s Grand Convertible concept, which if built would have an equally enormous back seat.
Ingress and egress are achieved through forward-opening “coach” doors of the kind once known on American cars as “suicide doors.” This makes it possible for passengers to not just “get out” of a Dawn, Rolls-Royce wants you to know, but to “stand and disembark as if from a Riva motor launch onto a glamorous private jetty in Monaco or on Lake Como.”
They create a generous space as they swing open, and for the same reason are difficult to close manually. No problem: Press the button just forward of the front seats, and the doors swing gently shut.
Rolls-Royce ran the risk that its guests might be more enchanted by the El Encanto, or more engrossed in the Grassini wines, than impressed by the automobile. But the handcrafted meals and the vintner-selected wines only heightened the experience. My fellow drivers were voluble in their praise.
They were not alone. The convertible was recently named Top Gear Magazine’s luxury car of the year. Robb Report last week blessed the vehicle with its 2016 design of the year award, saying it “redefines the notion of a true super-luxury Drophead.”
Rolls representatives said the company sold 4,000 cars last year, a third of those in North America and a lot of those in California. Around 80% of its vehicles’ purchasers are “new wealth entrepreneurs,” Rolls reps said, businessmen who made their own money and are happy to spend $400,000 on four wheels. Their average age is 47 — younger than one might think.
With the Dawn, they’d acquire one of the best automobiles ever built — and the bragging rights that go with it.
As Rolls’ North American Chief Executive Pedro Mota said, “The car makes you feel special — like a lord or something.”
That wasn’t exactly my experience, and though I was treated very nicely by the El Encanto and Grassini staff, no one called me Sir Charles. But I did feel lucky to be rolling through the lush Santa Ynez landscape in such a lovely car.
