It’s the Ghost designed to appeal to a younger, brasher audience.

REGARDLESS what its name might imply, the Rolls-Royce Black Badge Ghost is available in any colour you can imagine.

The brand offers 44,000 options in that respect.

One favourite is the unique-to-type Black Diamond finish; a new hue that requires five layers and adds 45kg to the kerb weight.  

But, hey, it’s already a hefty car already, deporting a Land Cruiser-like 2490kg. One with hefty performance and, ahem, a hefty price tag: $763,000 is the entry spend on this bad boy.

And that’s an appropriate descriptive, BTW. The Black Badge is the rebel of the family; it’s your darker, sportier model.

 Black Badge modifications intend to bring out a darker, edgier side to Rolls-Royce product. Availed since 2016, the treatment has already applied to the Wraith, Dawn, Cullinan and the previous generation of the Ghost. It has now arrived on the latest ‘G’.

Here in NZ? Well, in this demonstrator example. Orders are now being taken, price depending on how extravagantly kitted each becomes. As usual, that means a lot of stuff.

The development is this famous marque’s way of playing to the fact that it has a mixed clientele these days: Rappers, tech billionaires, property tycoons and maybe even top-rating talkback radio hosts. BTW, Rolls-Royce prefers not to call its clients customers. They’re ‘patrons.’

Designer Henry Cloke says it’s a Ghost with “a more urban, more streetwise feel.”

That comes across in the darkened chrome used on the famous Spirit of Ecstasy, the more sinister pantheon grille and the impressive wheels that feature 22 layers of carbon fibre. It also takes four people, five hours to hand-polish the exterior paintwork.

The Black Badge emblem, a horizontal ‘Lemniscate’ motif, appears everywhere inside. A mathematical symbol for potential infinity, it was applied to Malcolm Campbell’s record-breaking, Rolls-Royce powered Blue Bird hydroplane and apparently encapsulates the marque’s “unrelenting pursuit of power.” 

 The dashboard on the passenger side lights up to reveal 850 stars in a constellation, picked out by 90,000 laser-etched dots across the surface of the veneer. You can have stars in the roof lining, too. The touch-screen technology comes courtesy of parent group BMW. 

Rolls is heading down the electric route, but this model still flies the flag for the twin turbocharged 6.75 litre V12, with pumped to 441kW and 900Nm – so that’s 21kW and 50Nm more than standard.

It runs through an eight-speed auto. Stompy? Just a bit. “Low” mode speeds up gear shifts by 50 percent, changes the exhaust mode and essentially allows this very heavy, very big car to blast down a straight line in launch mode. Zero to 100kmh then occasions in 4.7 seconds. Top speed is 250kmh.

 Fuel consumption is supposed to average out at 14.8 litres per 100km. But even with petrol over $3 a litre, that’s hardly going to come into it, right?