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"\n\n When the new Rolls-Royce Ghost's namesake, the Silver Ghost, hit the streets in 1907, its upstart makers could fairly claim that it was the smoothest, most silent machine on the day's very uncrowded roads\u2014so quiet it was ghostly. Today most cars are silent, but few are as luxuriously, opulently so as the new \"baby\" Rolls.\n\n Baby is a relative term, of course\u2014the smaller Rolls sedan is still a massive, upright machine whose presence would be unavoidable on account of its size, even if there wasn't that celebrated grille and giant chrome hood ornament out front to boldly declare to all who might be looking: Big money spoken here. It's just that the Ghost is more personal-sized than the Phantom, the dreadnaught flagship of the Rolls-Royce line, which, spoiler alert, we also love.\n\n Silence is a relative term, also. Rolls-Royce's famous slogan used to be, \"At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.\" Hyperbolic in the '50s, when ad man David Ogilvy turned it into advertising history, it's still not true today, even after so many advances in the control of audible vehicle intrusions \u2014what the engineers call NVH, or noise, vibration, and harshness\u2014with the adoption of flush glass, sound-deadening body cavity injections, and the like. For in the new Ghost, the primary sound you hear\u2014despite its potent 12-cylinder life force, which has every right to sound like a beast but doesn't\u2014is the unavoidable, unmaskable thrum of its tires: huge, optional, 19-inch Goodyear run-flat tires, pounding the grooved pavement and expansion cracks of the LA freeways we're exploring like funky drummers in the parking lot of a Moe show.\n\n We're not big fans of run-flat tires, which tend to the noisy; then again we'd have to keep a man in the car at all times to change the opulently large and heavily chromed alloy rims if we had a flat with an ordinary spare, so we'll live with them. In any event, you have the sense the Rolls is going to win and the pavement is going to lose in any battle between them. For this is truly a special automobile, not something you can say whole-heartedly about the Rolls that masqueraded as the \"best\" cars in the world in the '80s and '90s, before outside money came in to rescue the firm.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n In one of the auto industry's many historic ironies, Rolls-Royce and its sister brand Bentley were separately scooped up by German companies BMW and Volkswagen at the turn of the century. Not to get all historical, but it was thus that World War II's vanquished European power managed to obtain the victors' most treasured brands for itself. They then set about depicting and defining British luxury in their own unique ways.\n\n It cannot be gainsaid that the cars are undoubtedly better for their German connections. Along with Mercedes-Benz, with the S-Class-derived Maybach, these big German companies have as much technological smarts as anyone in the world. So, state-of-the-art performance is no stretch. Reliability, long the weak link in British machinery, no matter how beautiful or sensuous, has been another welcome side benefit of German involvement.\n\n The differences between the companies' interpretations of luxury have been fascinating, but it is the surrogate British brands that really tickle the imagination, as they've both been successful on their own terms. Daimler's resuscitation of Maybach, a German brand last seen in the 1930s, has been less successful, largely because it has been less convincing. Largely because of the company's lack of investment and effort in support of their millionaire's brand, Maybach's parent continues to appear content offering extraordinary hyper-sedans under its own Mercedes name, extinguishing any need for a Maybach. The British sub-brands set out, more aggressively but each in its own way, to scratch a different itch, and they're keeping the hits coming.\n\n Bentley under Volkswagen has built some serious belters, as its British workers might call its performance-oriented models, but it entered the market at a lower price point\u2014its first new-era models starting around $140,000\u2014 from which they've worked their way up, a strategy dictated in part by VW setting higher initial sales targets. As a downside result, however, its fittings tend to feel less bespoke, more related to the underlying Audis and VWs from which many of its excellent pieces derive, and thus allowing for the possibility which I experienced firsthand last summer in L.A.\u2014six Bentley Continentals at one traffic light. As the drivers eyed each other, only one of us was laughing.\n\n Rolls-Royce, which relaunched from a severely-art-directed green factory on the Sussex grounds of the Earl of March and Kinrara's stately home, Goodwood, took a different tack, stepping first into more rarefied territory with the $350,000-plus Phantom, easily the hugest five-seat conveyance we can imagine, but one we admire for its old-fashioned take on luxury, and the fact that while being huge, outlandish, and aggressive, it still manages to be good to drive and strangely tasteful. Manning it is like piloting a battle cruiser, yet with its modern aluminum space frame and mission-tuned BMW mechanics, it is surprisingly wieldy.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n While hardly intended for the workingman, the Ghost shaves more than 100 grand off the price of the Phantom, while being built to the same broad formula. It has almost as much presence and a similar magic carpet dimension, but it's more frigate-class\u2014almost a foot and a half shorter\u2014but no shrinking violet, at a hair under 18-feet, narrower, and 300 pounds lighter, making one able to traverse ordinary roads with less fear that you will sideswipe a cyclist or run over a homeless man without noticing.\n\n It's also faster, when pressed, reaching sixty in 4.8 seconds, thanks to a V-12 that serves up 563-horsepower and 575 lb/ft of torque through an eight-speed automatic, yet its road manners are if anything more faultless than the luxurious Phantom. If the Ghost doesn't stop on a dime, it will on the hundred-dollar bill I dropped 90% of filling its tank with premium fuel. The tank is large, though; the EPA says the new Rolls will return 20mpg on the highway, which doesn't even sound that profligate.\n\n As a group, enormous luxo-barges are not my thing, but I enjoyed this car tremendously, and not just because it makes one feel good to drive it, which it does. In L.A., where you are what you drive, I became a hero in my own time thanks to the Ghost, getting shown the kid-glove treatment by everyone from restaurant and hotel parking valets to pubescent boys and girls and their mothers at a Reformed Bar Mitzvah. The primary downside was the need to keep replenishing a stack of five-dollar bills ready for the tips that everyone expects from a man of substance when he steams up in a Roller. Catching myself as I prepared to tip my host's neighbor's nosy kids one night, I realized I'd need more practice before I'd become an accomplished Rolls driver.\n\n Of course there are limits to the envy one can handle. The airport parking lot bus driver expressed profound admiration for the blue Rolls as I turned it over for collection. But then he noted that a local real estate tycoon had, not far from where we spoke only the day earlier, been shot dead in his. And so a moment of silence for the unlucky soul who would become a ghost. Perhaps the departed was driving a Phantom."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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