At a launch party held Friday, January 3, 2003, at its $100 million Rolls-Royce factory in Goodwood, England, BMW announced the new Rolls-Royce, called the Phantom:
With its traditional grille and square face, the new Rolls-Royce Phantom certainly looks like the archetypal English car. But the chassis, body, driveline and other key mechanical components of the car are sourced from BMW AG factories in Germany.
Final assembly occurs at the energy-efficient Goodwood factory in southern England. The low-rise plant, designed to blend into the rolling landscape, will feature 400,000 trees and shrubs and what is said to be the largest biomass roof in Europe, with green plants growing out of the shingles. At Goodwood, workers paint the bodies, craft the leather and wood veneer trim, and perform final assembly.
The car was designed in a secret studio in a former bank in London but engineered mainly in Germany. BMW called on a former Rover Group engineer, who is British, to head the car project. Tim Leverton was a body engineer who became product director of the luxury and full-sized vehicle platform for the Land Rover brand when it was owned by BMW in the mid-1990s. He was appointed chief engineer of the Rolls-Royce vehicle project RR01 in April 1999.
Rolls-Royce expects to sell an average of 1,000 units a year over the 10- to 12-year life cycle of the Phantom. Forty percent of them will be in North America, Rolls CEO Tony Gott says. Gott, a 46-year-old engineer, is steeped in the luxury-car business. He had worked at Rolls-Royce and Bentley since the mid-1980s, rising to chief executive. In November 2001, he suddenly quit the operation then run by Volkswagen AG. His subsequent appointment as chief executive of BMW's Project Rolls-Royce - which is how Rolls-Royce Motor Cars was known until New Year's Day of 2003 - provided BMW with a well-qualified English front person.
BMW has appointed 70 dealers worldwide, including 25 in the United States and one in Canada. Many are established Rolls-Royce dealers who sold the cars when Rolls-Royce was owned by Vickers and later Volkswagen.
