Rolls-Royce has officially launched the Black Badge Ghost for commissions by Indian customers. The British super-luxury car brand says that this is the purest and most technologically advanced Black Badge motor car yet. RR had debuted Black Badge with Wraith and Ghost in 2016, followed by Dawn in 2017 then Cullinan in 2019 for a new segment of clients wanting to drive themselves.
To create what is the motor car industry’s darkest black, 45kg of paint is atomised and applied to an electrostatically charged body in white before being oven dried. Then two layers of clear coat is applied before being hand-polished by a team of four craftsmen to produce the marque’s signature high-gloss piano finish. As with the other black badges, the iconic Rolls-Royce hallmarks such as the high-polished Spirit of Ecstasy and Pantheon Grille get a chrome electrolyte coating and polish for the finish.
The new Black Badge Ghost gets is own unique version of 21-inch wheels fashioned out of 22 layers of carbon fibre. A 3D-forged aluminium hub is bonded to the rim using aerospace-grade titanium fasteners and finished with the marque’s hallmark Floating Hubcap, so the RR monogram remains upright at all times.
The Black Badge Ghost also gets Rolls-Royce’s proprietary all-aluminium spaceframe architecture that debuted with Phantom. This sub-structure not only delivers extraordinary body stiffness, but its flexibility and scalability allowed Ghost to be equipped with all-wheel drive, four-wheel steering and the award-winning Planar Suspension system. For Black Badge, these qualities have been re-engineered, including the fitting of more voluminous air springs to lower body roll during cornering.
A Rolls-Royce statement mentions that the capacity of the twin-turbocharged 6.75-litre V12 engine was deemed sufficient. However, it has been tuned to generate an extra 29PS, creating a total output of 600PS. The sense of a single infinite gear has also been dramatised with the addition of a further 50NM of torque, for a total of 900NM. The powertrain has also received Bespoke transmission and throttle treatments to further enhance the engine’s increased power reserves. The ZF eight-speed gear box and both front-and rear-steered axles work collaboratively to adjust the levels of feedback to the driver, depending on throttle and steering inputs.