Rolls-Royce unveils driverless, electric concept car, complete with silk love seat

Wow, this looks like it comes right out of Blade Runner....

The Rolls-Royce 103EX

The luggage (née engine) compartment

The silk 'love' seat

A handy umbrella hidden in the door of the Rolls-Royce 103EX

by Michael Harvey of www.telegraph.co.uk

For a manufacturer that’s never really done a concept car before, Rolls-Royce did really well yesterday with the launch of its luscious 103EX concept. It knew that gimmicks like a ‘virtual red carpet’ projected from the car on the pavements outside the world’s leading hotels, bars, restaurants and nightclubs would prove excellent clickbait. It did. Ditto the elegant silk love seat, room enough for two (or maybe three, nudge-nudge).

Don’t go thinking Rolls was entirely pandering to the world’s sidebars of shame; egress from the car, which allows both passengers (there are no drivers, but we’ll come to that) to stand up before exiting will deprive the world’s more depraved paparazzi of one particular money-spinning shot. Rolls knows how to play to the gallery these days. It knows its customers even better.

Let’s get one thing straight, the 103EX is absolutely beautiful. Just about recognisable as a car as we know it, but so full of sculptural form and obsessive detail it crosses the line between automotive and art. You don’t need to understand it to be transport to appreciate its beauty. Cars were like this once, they will be again if Rolls-Royce’s version comes to be. Rolls doesn’t take orders these days, it takes ‘commissions’, so extensively personalised are its range of cars – Ghost, Wraith, Dawn and the soon be discontinued Phantom VII family – before they leave the factory. It long ago became common down at Goodwood for customers to be invoiced twice the list price of the car, so extensively modified are their new cars.

Yet the notion of ‘commissioning’ is a bit of a conceit as the cars do all look fundamentally the same. They have to, so stringent are the laws protecting both passengers and pedestrians, so exhaustive the proving of compatibility with those laws. They are of course all built on the assumption that cars will crash into each other, into solid objects, into soft flesh. But what if you remove that assumption? 103EX does.

If you wanted to classify 103EX, it’s a next-but-two Phantom Coupe from around 2040. Only it’s not, because Rolls-Royce assumes it will have stopped building series production cars by then and will instead revert to its original business model (as in the big idea of Henry Royce and Charles Rolls) of providing a sublime mechanical platform on to which independent coachbuilders would construct a body and interior.

Only Rolls-Royce doesn’t want to give that side of the business away, not all of it, at least. So assuming then there are no rules dictating much of the exterior and interior design of the car, and there are technologies (such a 3D printing) that allow car makers to dispense with the expensive business of making tooling, the investment in which then needs to be amortised across the life cycle of vehicle, there is no reason why every car from a maker like Rolls-Royce need not look entirely different. 103EX is not then the Rolls-Royce of the future but a Rolls-Royce.

It’s enormously long – as long as the extended wheelbase Phantom – but surprisingly only chest height. The roof flips open (hinged left or right depending on where you park — not that driving on the left and driving on the right will be a thing once cars are all autonomous according to Rolls) to allow passengers to make the elegant exit. The vast cockpit, beautifully but minimally finished with just that silk sofa, and a large silk rug in front of the wall-to-wall screen with just a clock on what we call right now a dash, is the most extreme take on the autonomous assumption. There is no provision for a steering wheel, although Rolls believes some customers might specify one. 

Luggage is kept in the space which might right now house one of Rolls-Royce’s peerless V12 engines. The luggage (née engine) compartment sits suspended between two tall but extremely narrow ‘bicycle’ wheels semi enclosed in aerodynamic fairings with a cut-out that shows the wheel and gently alludes to both the aero engines of Rolls-Royce PLC (an entirely separate company these days) and the car's electrical power.

 

Royce loved his electric motors and believed them to have been ideal for the kind of car he had in mind: torquey and silent. He was 100 years before his time as the world is only really ready for battery-powered cars now and arguably only because of the bloody-mindedness of Elon Musk and Tesla. Rolls-Royce demonstrated an electric Phantom VII some years back but it appeared to get a better reaction from the press than it did customers who were said at the time — by Rolls-Royce — to still be very much in love with their V12s. No longer, apparently. Although it won’t say when, Rolls-Royce does now see an horizon for the V12. Beyond a certain date, and probably well before we see anything like the 103EX on the road there will be electric-powered Rollers. There will have to be; Norway for example is pondering banning the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2025. That’s just nine years away.

 

The 103EX — or something like it — is maybe three times as far off, and certainly wishful thinking in the lifetime of the vast majority of you reading this. So once you’ve got your fill of the sheer and incontestable beauty of this thing, imagine just how much more elegant still it will look navigating its way silently through an autonomously-controlled swarm of anonymously-designed Google and Apple ‘personal transporters’. With the 103EX, Rolls-Royce has made a bold and potent case for its own and for Luxury’s survival in an unrecognisable automotive future. Given that most of its ‘competitors’ subjugate luxury to outright performance, it’s going to fascinating to see how they respond.

 

Source;

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/luxury/motoring/rolls-royce-unveils-driverless-electric-concept-car-complete-wit/