Design your own $280,000 Rolls-Royce 'Ghost'

As many potential car buyers across America take a break from impulse buying, Rolls-Royce saw the opportunity to get people dreaming big -- err, virtually at least.

With the launch of their new RR4 model, named "The Ghost," RR put together an online "dream machine" to give everyone a chance to create and customize the Rolls that best suits their discriminating taste.

And why not, since all of us are dreaming of driving something that costs about as much as an ocean-view condo, med school tuition for two people, or, to put it in perspective, 1,450 3GS iPhones?

The 200EX itself is an experimental car designed to carry over to the production RR4 model, which will debut in Frankfurt, Germany, in September. The Ghost is set to go on sale in North America in 2010.

In the real world, this latest offering from Rolls-Royce Motor Cars is far from a bargain at its estimated price of $280,000 to $300,000 (which is still cheaper than the big Phantom’s $382,000 price tag), but the interactive website gives you some luxurious fun for absolutely no money.

As you tool around the site, you'll see features that simply don't exist on more affordable vehicles: folding  picnic tables for your backseat passengers to enjoy a meal en route, a panoramic sunroof covering two-thirds of the roof, and rear-hinged coach doors that swing open 83 degrees for a movie-star exit.

Rolls-Royce: The rich keep rolling

This just in: The economy is lousy. So, you might wonder: How are companies like Rolls-Royce doing?  
Just fine, thanks. In February, the company sold 36 cars in the United States. In February 2008, it sold 37. That's the sort of downturn a lot of luxury car companies could live with. Bentley sales, for example, dropped from 231 cars in February 2008 to 69 last month. Lamborghini sales dropped from 84 to 70, and Ferrari sales dropped from 135 to 90. With 30 dealers in America, Rolls-Royce has averaged 2.4 sales per dealer the first two months of the year.

That said, it is never easy to sell a car that starts at $380,000. To help, Rolls is dispatching product specialist Brian Clark, seen here, to multiple markets to host special test drives of the company's models for current and prospective customers of the dealership.

Despite being neither a current nor prospective customer, I was invited too.

The top-of-the-line model is the Phantom Extended Wheel Base model, (or EWB, if you want to sound like you know your Rolls models) stretched to give the rear-seat passengers — two, or in a pinch, three, should you be carpooling — extra feet of room.

Rolls-Royce: The audacity of scope

Rolls-Royce will debut a smaller, leaner, less formal car at the Geneva Auto Show on March 3: The 200EX concept is a near-production version of the saloon that will begin production in 2010.

So, is this a smaller Rolls for leaner times? Is the car's gross tonnage some kind of index of global economy?

Not really. The fact is, sales of the Phantom, extended-wheelbase Phantom, Coupe and Drophead Coupe have been brisk, despite the $400,000 to $560,000-plus price tag. The 200EX -- the development of which predates the current financial China Syndrome -- is about extending the brand to compete in the suburban grocery-getter segment. That's a price point in the $230,000 to $300,000-plus range, somewhere just above the coming Aston Martin Rapide and Porsche Panamera.

It's also about amortizing parent BMW's engineering costs in the new 7-series. The 7-series and 200EX will be mechanical first cousins.

But a smaller Rolls? How will that work?

This is a delicate matter. The visual language of Rolls-Royce cars is one of grandeur and monumentality, a kind of enduring classicism and formality somehow outside the stream of time: the long, proud prow, the Parthenon grille, the high shoulders and sweeping contours, the sheer dizzying size of the thing. A Hooper-bodied Phantom from the 1950s looks like it should have its own airport.