When one spends four hundred thousand dollars on a new car, can they be pretty much assured that nothing will go wrong as far as vehicular quirks (be it rattles, technological gremlins, or any other issues that most people can possibly encounter when buying a normal new car). Are there any stats on this sort of thing? IIRC Rolls Royce is not included in JD Power’s customer complaints data.
qu’est-ce que c’est le dope?
No - Rolls Royce is now owned by BMW, and thus the cars fairly loaded with high-tech gadgetry. I would imagine that the cars are checked quite thoroughly at the factory for rattles and other obvious quality issues - but the electronics still can and do fail. The Rolls Royce Phantom uses the same iDrive control software as other BMWs, which is notorious for being troublesome.
The difference is, when you have a problem with a car like that, the dealer comes and picks it up on a flatbed. And they make sure that they fix the problem on the first try.
Even before BMW, Rolls Royce wasn’t really known for their quality. They are largely hand-built cars, produced in volumes of a few hundred per year. Engineering resources are limited - they can’t spend $1 billion on research, development and testing like larger manufacturers can.
Balance the complexity of the car against the efforts by the manufacturer to eliminate them, a prestige model will have more effort put into ironing out flaws than a bog standard hatchback.
Anything, and I do mean anything more mechanically complex than a crowbar can break. Furthermore you can bend a crowbar.
I have no idea of the reliability of new RR cars, I would guess then are no more or less reliable than other cars.
One place where you will see a difference is how you are treated when your car does go to the dealer. Spend 400 large on a car and you will get treated much nicer by the dealer when it breaks. They will probably send a flatbed to pick up the car for an oil change at no charge to you. Try to get that kind of service with a 2 year old Kia. 
When you are sitting on the side of the highway with a broken down RR waiting for the flatbed you don’t get a lot of sympathy from the traveling public.
You’re right, the RR isn’t known to be trouble free. Buy a Lexus and get where you are going when you intended to get there.
P.S. Mercedes is at the bottom of the list (despite their cost) for consumer satisfaction.
They were horribly complex, to no good purpose. For example, Rolls used a unique shifter mechanism-when you activated the shift lever, you didn’t activate the gearbox directly-you actuated a servo motor , which made another servo shift the gears-what a stupid system! It added nothing but extra complexity. Plus the cars weighed in excess of 4400 lbs-and Roll Royces were VERY thirsty! Of course, if you are a millionaire, who cars if your car gets 5 MPG?
A related question (perhaps): Are any of those suckers crash-tested?
also worth considering: when you own a rolls, you likely have access to a fleet of vehicles, and so aren’t particularly bothered by a day away from one of your many luxury cars.
I think it would be just the opposite. When you pour out hundreds of thousands of them, you have a better idea of what can go wrong. In my particular company, we don’t distinguish between low end and high end when it comes to TGW – things gone wrong.
Well, I imagine a large proportion of these cars will be driven by chauffeurs, whose duties will also include keeping an eye on the mechanical state of the car. That probably keeps the issues percieved by the owners down to a minimum.
I’m told that the very high end sports cars are not particularly reliable, or even durable, i.e. the ultra lightweight, high stress parts generally have a rather short lifespan. The more exotic you get, the more they start to resemble planes that require more man hours of maintainance than operation.
Porsche is one of the few companies generally known for making high performance vehicles that are also reliable commuter cars.
If they are sold in the US they have to be crash tested. There are exotic cars that are not sold in the US because the manufacturer is not willing to sacrifice a car to a crash test.
You can see the official recall notices for Rolls-Royce here: http://www.internetautoguide.com/auto-recalls/01-int/rolls-royce/index.html
The list seems pretty small compared to most auto brands.
For example, there has only been 1 recall in the last 5 years, for a defective rear shock absorber in the 2006 Rolls Royce Phantom. It affected 32 vehicles.
So, if you put a RR on a treadmill, which would break down first?
grin
FML
In Europe the EuroNCAP organisation crash tests cars and awards ratings that many manufacturers use (especially when rated highly!)
The Rolls doesn’t appear on their main site but a few webpages like this one list NCAP ratings so a few Rolls were sacrificed in the name of safety.
Some while back I had a Lada Riva aka “A Tank” and on the Mway I passed a broken down RR.
Great joy and blowing of horn
While Rolls operates on a slightly different plane, Jaguar and Mercedes-Benz have made some quite epically unreliable cars in the past. (Check out Consumer Reports’ just-released car issue – Just about every Mercedes model gets big black circles for reliability.) Granted, they are highly complex and there are many, many things to break down. But I think a bigger factor is simply that most of the Mercedes-Benz price premium is for cachet, not bulletproof construction.
Rolls Royces are made by hand, which gives them a nice selling point for those who like to hang their self-esteem on such things. But are hands better than robots in making a reliable car? Honda and Toyota would say no.
A:nd even before that they could have problems. Sometime in the early 1970’s a guy I knew was left A LOT of money by his parents. As far as I knew his only extravagance was to buy himself a Rolls.
About a year after he bought it I asked him how he liked the car. His answer was, “It’s OK now.” When I asked why “now” he said that the airconditioner acted up continually for the first 6 months or so and had to be replaced. Then the transmission failed because of overheating. It had to be replaced and the new one had fins on the case for better cooling.
The replacements were at no cost to him but it was a pain in the ass.
I am certainly glad that I didn’t buy that Rolls then if there is even a hint of worry about it.
yeah, I went with a used 1997 Ford Ranger pickup. I woke up and quit dreaming.
Recalls aren’t necessarily the best indicators of overall quality, though (by quality, I mean manufacturing quality, not adornments like real wood, leather, etc.). Recalls (voluntary or NHTSA-mandated) are almost always safety related. The thing to look at is industry things-gone-wrong data or warranty claims.
I worked in the parts department of a local Ford dealer back in 1978-1980 when it also had a RR franchise. The RR was dropped after that time because they could only supply us with six cars a year, which was far fewer than we could sell.
The Rolls was a beautifully appointed car compared to everything else. Real polished wood, fine leather seats, flawless body and paint. But if you looked under the trunk carpet and poked under panels and such, the car was no better made than a Lincoln.
The only regular work we ever did on the cars was brakes. The Rolls had a very strange brake system that had several additional complex pieces that I have never seen on another car. Instead of fluid going from the master cylinder to the wheel cylinder, as in most cars, it had to run through a series of servos or valves, which tended to break down. It cost a small fortune to do a brake job because of the extra parts and their pricing.
We had one car come in for a lot of mechanical work. It needed a transmission rebuild, but getting the parts was no problem for me because it had a Chevy TH400 automatic transmission in it. I got the parts from a nearby Buick dealer. It also needed an air conditioning compressor and a few other pieces. No problem, they were also Chevy parts. All the parts guys were quite amused that an expensive car like a Rolls had so many Chevy parts on it.
Of course, the owner probably paid a fortune for those parts, being as how it was a Rolls. There was one air conditioning valve that the mechanic insisted I order from Rolls that was only about an inch long. When it came in, I opened the Rolls box to look at the part and found a typical red and white GM Delco box inside with the part. What cost about $45 from Rolls was an extremely common GM part available in any auto parts store for about $5.
Interesting thing about Rolls parts back then - at that time we ordered parts from New York, and anything that they did not have in stock had to come from Rolls in England. We were informed at one time that no parts would be available from England for a month or so. Turns out the Rolls plant used old wood shelving to store their parts on and had been using this setup for decades. A lot of parts were not marked but located on shelves. Seems everyone knew where the parts were in the shelving and didn’t need a number to locate them.
One day someone with a forklift hit one of the shelves and it fell into another, causing a domino effect that knocked down a lot of shelving and scattered parts all over the floor. Now, no one could identify many of the parts and the place shut down for a month to straighten it all out. I heard that a lot of older and rare parts were lost that day because they could not be identified, so they were simply thrown out.