Rolls Royce Dusts Off, Rebrands as Modern Machine

[Chalupa]

Rolls Royce Dusts Off, Rebrands as Modern Machine
Wed Sep 22, 2004 01:40 PM ET

By Jane Barrett

PARIS (Reuters) - Say Rolls Royce and you imagine a huge, lumbering limousine swathed in soft leather and burled walnut and favored by royalty and the exceedingly rich of a certain age.

The newest Rolls is still massive, but the marque, relaunched last year, insists it is a thoroughly modern machine and is assiduously courting new customers, some of whom are only in their 20s.

"A hundred years of history can work for you but it has also worked against us a bit," Rolls Royce Chief Executive Karl-Heinz Kalbfell told Reuters on the sidelines of a car conference.

"This is one of the most modern cars in the world and we've had to work hard to get people to look past the history and its problems," he added.

Rolls Royce had suffered from a lack of innovation and quality in the past, which stood in stark contrast to the image of the "Roller" being the traditional status symbol of somebody who had made it to the top.

Now owned by BMW, the Phantom car still looks quite British, but it is made from aluminum to lighten the load and under the hood lies top-of-the-range German technology that makes it more fuel-efficient than its ancestors.

Rolls Royce now has 67 dealers based in moneyed hubs like Pebble Beach and Paris who work very closely with customers, lauding its new technology, listening to their every whim and investing dozens of hours in each 325,000-euro Phantom they sell.

The average Rolls Royce buyer is now in their late 50s but Kalbfell said the younger generation is also being attracted to the brand as are people in new markets like South Korea and China, where it expects to sell 40-50 cars this year.

"People are now attracted by the car itself rather than wanting to buy it to project an image," Kalbfell said.

Rolls Royce is considering giving the heavy, square Phantom a sibling -- a convertible car whose prototype has generated huge interest and which could lower the average age of Rolls buyers.

It is also looking at a longer sedan and an armored car but Kalbfell said new models would have to add to the 1,000 Phantoms it aims to sell per year, not cannibalize existing sales.

He declined to comment on the sales potential of new cars or how many Phantoms had purred their way off the production line so far this year.