Category: Convertibles 
Price Range: £315,250 to £315,250
Incredible presence, fabulous ride, engine refinement, material quality.
Insufficient wind isolation with roof down, modest performance, rear legroom.
A beautifully engineered wealth statement which doesn't quite deliver on the promise of its appearance.
Slowly and stealthily, Rolls-Royces are becoming more sporting. Chief engineer Helmut Riedl admits that the Drophead is more agile than a Phantom, that next year's coupe (still unofficial, but cast iron guaranteed) will be more sporting still and that the much rumoured 'small' Rolls (which will still cost as much as a Bentley Arnage) will continue this trend.
But while the Drophead will be a touch more responsive than a Phantom simply because of its shorter wheelbase, it's still a long way from what anyone might feel inclined to describe as sporting in character. The steering remains fingertip light and while it is surprisingly easy to place the considerable bulk of the Drophead accurately on the road this, emphatically, is not a car to be driven around on its elegant chromed door handles. Try this and it will lurch and lean until the combination of tortured 21" Goodyears, electronic stability control and good old fashioned common sense forces you to back off. Drive it merely swiftly, however, and it flows through the curves with grace and poise.
Perhaps the single most stunning aspect of the entire car is that the ride quality of the Phantom saloon - arguably the best of any car in the world - has been passed on in almost undiminished form. Given the shorter wheelbase, stiffer damping and lack of a roof, that is an achievement little short of startling. Its ability to waft down a poorly surfaced street without allowing the smallest disturbance to interfere with your tranquillity is little short of miraculous. If you attack an undulating road with real vigour expecting the Drophead to heave over crests and wallow in dips, you'll discover it is almost impossible to upset its equilibrium. If there is a more serene means of crossing the face of the planet with the wind in your hair, we've yet to experience it.
Disappointing. We know Rolls-Royce has not set out to build a supercar, but a car of this stature and this cost nevertheless creates a level of expectation about the way it is going to perform and it is one to which the Drophead fails entirely to ascend. Rolls-Royce may choose to dismiss this as pure subjectivity - less easy to explain will be the fact that while it claims a Drophead will hit 60mph in 5.7sec, we could only get there in a fraction under 7.5sec which, at this level, is a night and day difference. You can buy a VW Eos that's quicker than that. Granted our test was informal and used only the speedometer and a hand-held stopwatch, but it was averaged in two directions and, because speedos are not allowed to under-read by law, any inaccuracy was entirely in the Phantom's favour.
Moreover the ZF gearbox seemed reluctant to kickdown, making overtaking needlessly hard work. At least the V12 is impressively smooth and, at idle, near enough inaudible. In fact it's so quiet at tickover you can amaze your friends by setting off apparently before you've started the engine. We know, we tried.
