A Rolls Royce is always a bit special. Like a bespoke suit, the cars are packed with detail and small elements of handiwork that elevate the vehicle above most other luxury cars. However, Rolls Royce is a big fan of special edition vehicles, and that can lead to a dilemma. How do you make something already special stand out even more? One thing you can do is take inspiration from a rare astronomical phenomenon, and that’s what the British luxury car maker has done with the Rolls-Royce Black Badge Ghost Ékleipsis.
Solar eclipses themselves occur pretty frequently but usually involve the moon blocking out a small slice of the sun. Total eclipses are rarer, taking place every couple of years on average. However, as our planet is mostly oceanic, total eclipses you can see from a populated piece of land are still rarer. Almost as rare as the Black Badge Ghost Ékleipsis — Rolls-Royce only made 25 of them, and they have all been allocated to some of the prestigious brand’s luckiest clients.
Still, while you can’t have one and are probably more likely to see a total eclipse than spot a Rolls-Royce Black Badge Ghost Ékleipsis in the wild, you can still take a look at its unique features and admire both the thinking and handiwork that goes into them. Here are the five that we believe stand out the most.
There’s a little eclipse on the headliner
With a vehicle that is known for its star-filled (and sometimes shooting star-filled) headliners, it can be hard to up its game when the time comes for a special edition variant. Rolls Royce has not only managed to do that, but has also tied the feature in with the eclipse itself.
When activated, 940 “stars” will draw together to form a corona-like ring in the center of the canopy. It’s basically a mini-eclipse occurring within your vehicle. One hundred ninety-two other “stars” are also flecked throughout, mimicking the stars you will see during the day when a total eclipse is happening.
Rolls Royce has set the animation to run for precisely seven minutes and 31 seconds. The logic behind this is, again, eclipse-related. That’s the maximum amount of time totality will last if you find yourself in the right spot during a total eclipse. It’s another of those little “if you know, you know” features that will go unnoticed by many but ultimately highlight the amount of thought that’s gone into every aspect of this vehicle.
The paint is eclipse-like
High-end car companies have often put a lot into their paints, but over the past few years, things have gotten pretty special. Rolls is no exception and has somehow incorporated elements of a major celestial event into the outside of its limited-run vehicle.
The “Lyrical Copper” finish Rolls Royce has selected for the Black Badge Ghost Ékleipsis contains powdered copper pigmant. This sort of acts like an eclipse in the way that it appears dark until it catches the light just right, a bit like the corona that circles the moon’s shadow when a total eclipse happens.
To support this, Rolls has added various Mandarin accents to the vehicle, including on the brake calipers, the coachline, and the inserts below the Pantheon Grille.
There’s a real diamond in the dash
The Rolls-Royce Black Badge Ghost Ékleipsis comes with a little extra on top of its illuminated fascia. A diamond has been embedded into its dashboard close to the vehicle’s clock. The stone is a homage to one of the eclipse’s most memorable moments, the “diamond ring effect.” The effect occurs in the seconds before and after the moon covers our closest star. A very bright point of light can usually be seen, combining with the corona to create a diamond ring-like image in the sky.
Rolls use a 0.5 karat stone in an attempt to make its dash stand out on the Black Badge Ghost Ékleipsis. It’s one of those small luxury design elements that may initially go unnoticed, but it ultimately sums up the level of luxury and attention to detail people get from a Black Badge edition Ghost.
It has a special illuminated fascia
Creating perceived randomness is more difficult than it sounds. Take a handful of small things, pebbles, sweets, whatever you have handy, and throw them up in the air. The mess on your floor is essentially a random scattering of them, and it probably looks terrible. The stars are also essentially random, scattered across the vast vacuum of space by whatever cosmic event created everything billions of years ago. But they look good, people have been staring up at them for as long as people have existed, probably.
Rolls Royce was obviously hoping for something closer to the vast array of bright dots adorning our night sky than the clumps of Fruity Pebbles you hopefully didn’t just dash all over your living room. That’s why some chap, which Rolls has described as a “single Bespoke designer,” is responsible for placing each and every bright dot exactly where it should be. All 1,846 of the laser-etched dots you see on the fascia. The size of each “star” is also set by the bespoke designer, who apparently put 100 hours into the decorative element.
Its interior is inspired by another ecliptic phenomenon
One of the weirdest things about the eclipse, and something you can still enjoy even if clouds are covering the main event, is the “panoramic sunset.” As you’re probably aware, a normal sunset happens when the sun dips beyond the western horizon. Look west, and you’ll see some beautiful yellows, oranges, reds, and purples as light refracts through the atmosphere. Behind you in the east is darkness. During a total eclipse, you’re totally surrounded by that sunset in every direction you look.
The Rolls-Royce Black Badge Ghost Ékleipsis attempts to recreate that in its interior. The Mandarin accents you may have noticed on the outside make another appearance, adding one of the more common sunset colors. The seats themselves are a combination of orange and black, again giving a nod to the sunset. The mandarin leather that clads most interior surfaces is also darkened but perforated to reveal brighter underlying colors and create contrast. Those perforations aren’t random, they’re actually a pattern that Rolls’ design team put a lot of effort into developing. It’s details like that which make Rolls Royce one of the most well-regarded luxury car makers in the world.
