Rolls Royce Wraith Price For Sale Top Speed 2016 - It is a historical curiosity that when Rolls-Royce first used the
Wraith name way back in the late 1930s, the company sold only the
running chassis. Independent coachbuilders supplied the bodies, built to
reflect the owner’s particular (and sometimes peculiar) taste. These
days, the new Wraith’s running gear traces its ancestry to corporate
overlord BMW, while the body is the portion that defines a modern Roller
as both distinct and distinctly British.
Odd, then, that the Wraith’s fastback roofline—the car’s defining
feature—was cribbed from a couple of Italian cars. You see, Rolls has no
precedent for a roofline that looks anything like this, so its
designers couldn’t play the heritage card. According to design director
Giles Taylor, the inspiration comes instead from the Lancia Aurelia coupe and the Maserati Ghibli (the original coupe introduced in 1967,
not the recently introduced sedan of the same name). In profile, in
person, this car looks spectacular and improbable. It’s such a massive
and unexpected thing in any setting you can imagine. And it’s so
gloriously space-inefficient, so unchained from the tedious priorities
of regular cars. The sharp crease between the roofline and the brutal,
bricklike shape of the lower body serves to make the Wraith one of few
modern cars that looks totally appropriate in a two-tone paint job.
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The Wraith is longer than a Chrysler
minivan, seats three fewer people, and has more than double the power.
They both have two power-operated doors, though.
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Contrasting paint notwithstanding, the new Wraith has been cast as the
performance-minded Rolls-Royce, though the company is eager to add that
the Wraith is no sports car. So just in case you thought a 5500-pound,
17-plus-foot-long vehicle with power-operated doors was a sports car,
know that you would be wrong. The Wraith’s 624-hp twin-turbocharged V-12
is the most powerful engine offered in any of the company’s cars, and
we expect that it will carry the Wraith to 60 mph from a standstill in
4.3 seconds. And it will do so with a measured thrum from the exhaust
that only plays background to whatever soundtrack you’ve chosen to pipe
through the Naim audio system.
It’s more powerful and quicker than the Ghost sedan,
which served as the donor car for this monstrous coupe. The company
chopped more than seven inches from the Ghost’s wheelbase to create the
Wraith.
But, at 122.5 inches, the coupe’s wheelbase is still longer than
that of a Chrysler 300.
This, along with an overall width greater than most mid-size SUVs (76.7
inches) and a steering wheel the size of a manhole cover, makes the
Wraith feel predictably enormous. The sensation was exacerbated by our
test route, made up largely of English country lanes. To our
consternation, they appeared to be only about the width of 1.2 Wraiths.
Yet you pretty quickly get used to guiding this blunt-nosed boat using a
light touch on the thin-rimmed wheel. Despite the BMW origins of its
mechanical bits and the fact that its chassis was tuned by a man named
Peter Kunzinger (who also tuned the BMW Z8
in an earlier life), the Wraith’s deportment is sort of the antithesis
of stereotypical German tuning. Its steering is light and friction-free,
though still accurate and tactile. And the mien of its suspension
(which consists of multilink front and rear wheel attachments, air
springs, electronically controlled dampers, and automatically adjusting
anti-roll bars) is likewise free and easy.
The big body is allowed to move around a bit, front to rear and side to
side, but it doesn’t bob or wallow. It’s all very gently controlled. And
despite wearing 45-series tires up front and 40-series in the back, the
Wraith doesn’t trouble its passengers with small, high-frequency
impacts. In fact, to our backsides, the Wraith’s ride quality felt
better than that of its bigger, less sporty brother, the Ghost sedan.
We got some time with the car on the historic Goodwood race circuit, not
so much to put down hot laps but more to get away from oncoming traffic
and England’s nasty curb stones. Here is what we remember most:
habitually going too fast. We would have sworn on the grave of someone’s
mother that we’d kept a lid on it, but the speedometer told a different
tale. Luckily, the brakes, with big 14.7-inch (front) and 14.6-inch
(rear) discs, work brilliantly to haul down a four-seat car that weighs
as much as a full-size pickup truck. Mind you, we didn’t run many
consecutive laps. But know that, driven like a gentleman, the Wraith is
capable of a surprisingly appalling pace.
The Wraith’s eight-speed automatic transmission is said to know what
sort of roads lie ahead (informed by the car’s navigation system), and
it prepares itself for upcoming turns and expressway on-ramps
accordingly. We’re not sure how we would know if this works or not,
since there is no way of turning it off. But we can at least say that
the transmission shifts very smoothly.
Ah, but a Rolls-Royce is as much about the plush interior as it is about
function, right? Sure. And here the Wraith doesn’t disappoint, either.
Its leather is predictably buttery, and its eyeball-like HVAC vents are
heavy, chromed metal balls that roll around smoothly in their sockets.
The scattershot placement of buttons and screens to control the wealth
of electronic doodads indicates that it’s not easy to simultaneously
look like royalty and a techie at the same time. Oh, and the wood! By
now you know of the absurd care and attention the wood veneers receive
at a place like Rolls-Royce.
The Rolls-Royce Wraith is a 4 seat coupé made by Rolls-Royce Motor Cars and based on the chassis of the Rolls-Royce Ghost. The vehicle was announced in January 2013 and unveiled at the 2013 Geneva Motor Show,It has a base price of £235,416 in the United Kingdom with current economy situations as of October of 2015.[6] Its chassis was designed by Pavle Trpinac. Deliveries are expected from 4th quarter of 2013. All models include the ZF "8HP90" 8-speed automatic transmission.
The name Wraith comes from an old Scottish word meaning image of a Ghost or Spirit, a name it shares with the 1938 model by the original Rolls Royce company.
The Rolls-Royce
Wraith is a car of considerable allure and significance. This, in our
view, is certainly the most important new model that this blue-blooded
British car maker has created since the modern Phantom in 2002.
The Phantom was a watershed, ushering the Goodwood-based firm into a new, successful era. Sure, in 2010 the Ghost brought in fresh buyers – but largely by miniaturising, de-formalising and slightly discounting the Phantom’s concept.
There have been plenty of Phantom-based and Ghost-based derivatives, of course.
But the Wraith is a true ground-breaker – not only the most powerful car in Rolls’ history but also the closest thing to a sports car that it has ever attempted to produce.
‘Wraith’ was first used on a Rolls-Royce in 1938, but the company’s cars were making a name for themselves as world-beating racing machines decades earlier.
Founder Charles Rolls won the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy in 1906 in a Light Twenty, for instance, and in 1913 Don Carlos de Salamanca won the first ever Spanish Grand Prix in a Silver Ghost. The current Ghost saloon — the car from which the Wraith is effectively adapted — was launched in 2010
Rolls-Royce describes this 624bhp, £230k two-door Wraith as a debonair gentleman’s GT – highly refined, luxurious and exclusive like its stablemates, but more dramatic and exciting than any of them.
In 110 years, there has never been such a thing as ‘just another Rolls-Royce’, but even in that rarefied context, the Wraith promises to be something very special indeed.
The Phantom was a watershed, ushering the Goodwood-based firm into a new, successful era. Sure, in 2010 the Ghost brought in fresh buyers – but largely by miniaturising, de-formalising and slightly discounting the Phantom’s concept.
There have been plenty of Phantom-based and Ghost-based derivatives, of course.
But the Wraith is a true ground-breaker – not only the most powerful car in Rolls’ history but also the closest thing to a sports car that it has ever attempted to produce.
‘Wraith’ was first used on a Rolls-Royce in 1938, but the company’s cars were making a name for themselves as world-beating racing machines decades earlier.
Founder Charles Rolls won the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy in 1906 in a Light Twenty, for instance, and in 1913 Don Carlos de Salamanca won the first ever Spanish Grand Prix in a Silver Ghost. The current Ghost saloon — the car from which the Wraith is effectively adapted — was launched in 2010
Rolls-Royce describes this 624bhp, £230k two-door Wraith as a debonair gentleman’s GT – highly refined, luxurious and exclusive like its stablemates, but more dramatic and exciting than any of them.
In 110 years, there has never been such a thing as ‘just another Rolls-Royce’, but even in that rarefied context, the Wraith promises to be something very special indeed.
What is it?
The most powerful and dynamic Rolls-Royce ever produced, according to the taglines. And the hardware sounds promising: a 6.6-litre, twin-turbo V12 that belts out 624bhp and 590lb ft of torque. That gives this enormous fastback serious pace: 0-62mph in 4.6 seconds and a limited 155mph. That’s pretty darn rapid for a 2,365kg leather and walnut living room on wheels. The other big news is obviously the two door shape. Yep, Rolls makes the Phantom Coupe, but that’s more of a tidier Phantom saloon – the Wraith is a full-on fastback, meaning super-raked C-pillar and a booted rear end that looks like it might contain an enormous hatchback. It’s awesome to see on the road, though slightly polarizing for onlookers.
Driving
Interesting one this, because although Rolls-Royce has determined that this is it’s quickest and most powerful car ever, when you first get into it, it feels a bit like a Ghost – wafty, silent, easy.But once you get going, the Wraith really is different. It never really shrinks-to-fit, because it’s always just massive, but it certainly motivates itself with the kind of speed that makes continents small. The BMW-derived V12 isn’t exactly vocal, but it still whooshes in all the right places, aided by a satellite-aided 8-speed ZF auto ‘box that means it never changes up (or down) at an inopportune moment. The steering is accurate but slightly aloof, the rear-wheel drive chassis nicely balanced on air-suspension, but never going to worry a razorblade for sharpness. It might not even worry a spork. But the Wraith transcends normal considerations such as ride and handling – it’s a majestic, wondrous thing to drive, and utterly unique.
On the inside
One of the Wraith’s strangest points: book-matched, gorgeous wood, leather softer than butter, and all the good technology nicked from top-end BMWs. That tech is well disguised as well, hidden beneath a classy veneer of Rolls- Royce fonts and glassware, plastics and lacquer. If it had a toilet, you’d want to live in it.Owning
Roughly 85 per cent of Wraiths will head through RR’s bespoke department, so if you’re ordering one, you probably aren’t all that bothered about the next bloke and your residuals. But the first year is sold out, so you can still expect the Wraith to be a pretty solid bet. Unless it’s been ordered in yellow with a green interior, that is.It’ll also be horrific to insure and run – although we did get 22mpg on a cruise. Hardly the stuff that’s going to save the planet but, for a car of this stature, pretty impressive.
Rolls royce Wraith Price lists $306,350
