BMW’s road to owning Rolls-Royce began long before the first Phantom rolled out of Goodwood. In the early 1990s, the Munich automaker made an unsuccessful bid to buy stakes in both Rolls-Royce and Bentley. A decade later, they finally got their chance — but not without a complicated battle with Volkswagen. At first, VW ended up with the designs, the Spirit of Ecstasy emblem, and the famous Pantheon grille, while BMW only secured the Rolls-Royce name and trademarks. For several months, it looked like VW might build Rolls-Royce cars using BMW’s engines under a licensing deal. Eventually, the two sides struck an agreement: starting in 2003, BMW would take full control of Rolls-Royce, while VW kept Bentley.
Kickstarting the Rolls-Royce Brand
Once the agreement was in place, BMW faced an unusual challenge: launching a new Rolls-Royce without a single carryover design or blueprint from the outgoing Silver Seraph. The company had the name, the badge, and the brand’s heritage — but none of the physical elements that made a Rolls instantly recognizable. That meant starting with a blank sheet of paper, reimagining every line and detail from the ground up.
Designer Ian Cameron set to work adopting the Pantheon grille (which was, at first, off-limits as part of the brand’s intellectual property) and reimagining the Spirit of Ecstasy for BMW’s first Rolls-Royce, the seventh generation Rolls-Royce Phantom. It replaced the Silver Seraph as Rolls’s full-size luxury sedan, which meant it needed epic proportions that heralded just how much money you were sharing the road with. As such, the Phantom touted a long wheelbase and hood and high roof with tall wheels and tires. Under the hood, the larger-than-life aesthetic continued. BMW bored and stroked their existing V12, the N73, to 6.75 liters. The new mill offered 453 horsepower at 531 pound-feet of torque, with much of the torque available from just 1,000 rpm.
Building Intrigue
Similar to BMW’s marketing blitz on the US with the MINI brand, Rolls-Royce’s debut oozed style. The car debuted in just three cities — Culver City, California, Miami, and Lyndhurst, New Jersey — in nondescript industrial buildings. You could only be invited if a Rolls-Royce dealership vouched for you and accompanied you to the viewing. The cloak and dagger added to the allure, and it worked. “It had a truly James Bond-like quality, and people loved it,” recounts Robert Austin, Rolls-Royce’s North American Communications Director at the time.
The Phantom’s success was strong enough that BMW soon began work on a smaller “entry-level” Rolls-Royce, the Ghost. Though still priced around $280,000, it was marketed as the “everyday” Rolls. As designer Ian Cameron explained to The New York Times in 2004: “Our owners typically have a five- or six-car garage. The Phantom might be a tuxedo…[the Ghost], a business suit. The tailor cuts the cloth the same way, but the suit is different.” Today, Rolls-Royce sells more than ten times as many cars as it did in 2003 — a transformation that began with the Phantom and the extraordinary circumstances of BMW’s takeover. What started as a failed bid in the 1990s became one of BMW’s most strategic victories, forged in tense negotiations with Volkswagen and the decision to design a Rolls-Royce entirely from scratch.