Black Badge Ghost Debuts In Georgia
Today the new Rolls-Royce Black Badge Ghost has made its debut in Georgia. Over the coming days the Who-is-Who of the society in the capital will gather first impressions during exclusive customer receptions.
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars has always attracted clients who are not satisfied with their status quo - women and men who built their success by taking risks and challenging conventions. In the 2020s, these individuals engage with luxury products on their own terms. They have created new codes of luxury that resonate with their sensibilities: darker in aesthetic, assertive in character and bold in design. Their approach to Rolls-Royce motor cars is no different.
Within the Ghost group of clients – who celebrate minimalism and material substance – a certain subset sought to create a disruptive expression of Ghost.
The marque has responded accordingly, developing new colour palettes, more technical surface treatments and even more powerful driving experiences without ever compromising the effortless sensibilities that have drawn this bold group of clients to the Rolls-Royce brand. Black Badge Ghost is the dark side of Post Opulence: minimalism in extremis.
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Baku, the sole Rolls-Royce dealership in Transcaucasia, hosted the event. Nurlan Panahli, Brand Manager in Baku, emphasized: “The Rolls-Royce Ghost presentation in Tbilisi in September last year was extremely well received by our clients in Georgia. Black Badge Ghost is the most advanced Black Badge model, I am confident it will further expand the footprint of Rolls-Royce in Georgia.”
Mark Clayton, British Ambassador to Georgia, said in his welcome address: “It´s fantastic to see Rolls-Royce presenting a new model in Tbilisi. The unveil of a new Rolls-Royce is a rare and special occasion, hence I am proud that we are able to show this fine example of the Best of British design, engineering and manufacture to our friends in Georgia.”
Clients are free to select any of the marque’s 44,000 ‘ready-to-wear’ colours or create their own entirely unique Bespoke hue. However, the overwhelming majority of women and men who requested this darker expression of Ghost have selected the signature Black. To create what is the motor car industry’s darkest black, 100lbs (45kg) of paint is atomised and applied to an electrostatically charged body in white before being oven dried. The motor car then receives two layers of clear coat before being hand-polished by a team of four craftsman to produce the marque’s signature high-gloss piano finish.
Rolls-Royce hallmarks such as the high-polished Spirit of Ecstasy and Pantheon Grille have been subverted. Instead of simply painting these components, a specific chrome electrolyte is introduced to the traditional chrome plating process that is co-deposited on the stainless-steel substrate, darkening the finish. Its final thickness is just one micrometre – around one hundredth of the width of a human hair.
The engineers created a vivid driving personality that matched Black Badge Ghost’s visual intent without compromising the marque’s effortless ride proclivities and exhaustive acoustic tuning.
The capacity of the Rolls-Royce twin-turbocharged 6.75-litre V12 engine was deemed sufficient. However, the flexibility of this celebrated power plant has been exploited to generate an extra 29PS, creating a total output of 600PS. The sense of a single infinite gear has also been dramatised with the addition of a further 50NM of torque, for a total of 900NM.
“It is great to be back in Georgia and present the alter ego of Ghost today,” said Frank Tiemann, Director of Corporate Communications Central/Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, at the event and continued, “Black Badge Ghost perfectly inherits the pedigree of Rolls-Royce in the spirit of Black Badge, taking the perfect interpretation of mystery and ultimate luxury into a different sphere.“