Bureaucracy Rules, OK!

Rolls-Royce Ghost

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Fraser Martin
09 March 2010

I recently returned from a trip to California, where the launch of the new Rolls Royce Ghost was held and am delighted to report that the Ghost, though a smaller Rolls Royce than we are used to in the Phantom series, is nevertheless, every bit as wonderful as I expected.

The first two thousand cars built will have limited options available as production gets underway, and whilst there are a few choices to be made – colour, trim and a couple of luxury additions – the basic car will be a four-door saloon, with emphasis on the driver rather than the rear seat passengers. The Ghost will be a Rolls Royce that the owner is expected to drive.

Coach doors on the rear compartment are now as symbolic of a Rolls Royce as the Spirit of Ecstasy atop the grille and the non-rotating centre-caps in the wheels. The engineers spent almost five years perfecting the coach doors so that they would both work faultlessly and meet the latest safety standards, particularly in the United States where bureaucracy dictates that no one has to take responsibility for their own actions – or so it seems on the basis of current litigation.

As a result of pushing the bureaucrats into seeing sense, Rolls Royce has quite literally opened a door on an old coachbuilding format that should never have been allowed to die out, and has paved the way for other manufacturers to reintroduce the principle of the rear-hinged door on many lesser offerings. The new Opel Meriva, a car that leads the mini-MPV thrust in Europe, as well as many concept cars in the last couple of years, have shown this feature to great effect and positive response.

But take a look at the new Ghost. An imposing, beautifully engineered car that reconfirms Rolls Royce as the makers of the best cars in the world – with the possible exception of the Mickey Mouse-ear door mirrors!

Driving the car was of course a delight, as long as we were not tackling city traffic. At junctions, these monster mirrors create such a huge blind spot that, rather than sitting comfortably in the sumptuous leather and wood ambience of a truly wonderful piece of automotive art, you find yourself jumping around to see past the bloody things in order to be sure you don’t drive up the wrong side of a traffic island. Why?

Bureaucracy, that’s why! The ‘powers that be’, making decisions about such things in Washington and Brussels have dictated that because the Ghost is over five metres long, it represents the bulk of a small van, and therefore the mirrors have to be bigger than those of a normal car. If ever there was a case of legislation compounding a problem that it was meant to solve, this is it.

Rolls Royce lobbyists are working hard to make the authorities see sense – as they did successfully in the case of the coach doors. But as long as there are people in legislative power that cannot see the wood – or the traffic islands – for the trees, I think all may be lost.

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