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Rolls-Royce says SUV will in fact be called Cullinan, releases photos

We have known the upcoming Rolls-Royce luxury SUV is called is called Cullinan for a while now, but it took until today for the manufacturer to officially acknowledge the name. Referring to the quite simply enormous Cullinan diamond, Rolls-Royce says the name befits the new "high-bodied vehicle," carefully steering around the SUV moniker. "The name Cullinan has been hiding in plain sight since we revealed it as the project name some years ago," says Rolls-Royce CEO Torsten Muller-Otvos. "It is the most fitting name for our extraordinary new product. Cullinan is a motor car of such clarity of purpose, such flawless quality and preciousness, and such presence that it recalibrates the scale and possibility of true luxury. Just like the Cullinan Diamond, the largest flawless diamond ever found, it emerges when it is perfect and exists above all others." This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. At the same time, Rolls-Royce also released new official photos of the Cullinan, though it is still wearing camouflage. One of the photos depicts a test mule climbing a muddy hill, a territory unclaimed by Rolls-Royces except for ones modified by privateer rally teams. The Cullinan, based on a new proprietary aluminum spaceframe, is expected to be unveiled by late summer 2018, with deliveries starting in 2019. The vehicle's introduction is planned to lift the brand's yearly sales to 5,000 units per year, as they fell to 3,362 in 2017. View 5 Photos Related Video: Image Credit: Rolls-Royce Motorcars Rolls-Royce SUV Luxury rolls-royce cullinan

Bloodhound SSC fires up Rolls-Royce jet engine for land speed record

RAF ST MAWGAN, England — Fizz, whirr, shriek, pop and silence ... It took several attempts to get the Bloodhound land speed record contender started for the first time on Sept. 28. On a bright and blustery day at RAF St Mawgan in Cornwall, in southwest England, the sense of occasion was palpable, if only the damn jet engine's blades would fire up. But the Rolls-Royce 20,232-pound-thrust turbofan wasn't going to give up its virgin status as a car engine easily. As driver, RAF pilot and current land speed record-holder Andy Green explained, the Rolls EJ200 is one of the most reliable military jet engines ever, but it's never been used before in a car. "I can show you figures of its incredible reliability," he said, "but every bit of its control software expects it to be in a Typhoon [fighter aircraft], and we have to keep telling it that it is in an aircraft, which needs some quick-footed work on the software." This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. Quick-footed indeed, as right there on the RAF St Mawgan runway, without a pizza or a Coca-Cola in sight, software engineer Joe Holdsworth performed a virtuoso piece of recoding on the engine's software to persuade it not to shut down in alarm at some low-level electrical interference it simply doesn't see in its normal aeronautical environment. Then, with just 20 minutes left of the team's running permission window, the remote jet starter cart shrieked, its air-delivery pipe bulged like an elephant's trunk blocked with a coconut and the massive turbofan spun, popped, emitted a polite ball of flame and smoked into life. No cheers or high-fives here; this is after all a British team. But there was clear delight from the 20 engineers attendant on Bloodhound. After three successful starts, Wing Commander Green leapt from the cockpit and Mark Chapman, chief engineer, pronounced that he was well satisfied and that the sight of a jet car surging gently against its arrestor cable and wheel chocks was awesome. "We knew it was going to take a couple of starts to get it running," said Chapman, who explained why the engine appeared so smoky at first. "This is an inhibited engine, so it was tested a couple of months ago at Rolls-Royce and basically filled with corrosion inhibitor, and you've got to blow that all through at the start.

Rolls-Royce planning one or two new models based on the Ghost

Fourteen years after Volkswagen bought Bentley, its English brand has two distinct lines, Mulsanne and Continental - with numerous variants at the Continental's lower price point - an SUV on the way and perhaps a sports car and a Mulsanne convertible, too. In the 14 years since BMW bought Rolls-Royce, its English brand has the Phantom and Ghost - with three variants at the Phantom's much higher price point. Rolls-Royce doesn't chase sales, but the difference in the brand direction helps explain why Bentley has sold more cars in the first six months of this year than Rolls-Royce sold all of last year.
And even though Rolls-Royce isn't solely about the tally, it would still like to improve on the 3,538 cars it sold last year - a sales record that eclipsed a mark set in 1978. To do so its CEO is planning one or two more Ghost-based models beyond the as-yet-unnamed Ghost Coupe due next year, perhaps to be called the Corniche, according to a report in Autocar. A convertible version of the Ghost Coupe is the obvious guess for one of them, and it would get the double-R "closer to 4,000" sales, where the CEO would like to be.
Sales might not be the only part of it, though; the headline of the Autocar piece says the CEO wants the new models because they're "required to give Rolls-Royce a proper identity." If that is accurate, we have no idea what kind of identity Rolls-Royce could be missing that would be served by a wider range of cars in the Ghost range, which by their place in the brand's own lineup are admittedly not the most opulent carriages on the planet.