Just 25 examples of the Rolls-Royce Ghost sun-worshipping special have been built, and they’ve already been allocated.
Did you know there’s going to be a solar eclipse on 14 October? Rolls-Royce has decided to mark the occasion by creating 25 very special editions of the already exclusive Black Badge Ghost called the ‘Ékleipsis Private Collection’.
And before you even think about it, every single one of them has already been allocated to some of the luxury carmaker’s favourite clients around the world. It’s probably why Rolls-Royce didn’t bother revealing the price of the Ékleipsis, though we expect it was well in excess of what you’d ordinarily pay for a Black Badge Ghost.
Rolls-Royce doesn’t mess around when it comes to its limited edition models. Even the Lyrical Copper paint colour is unique for the Ékleipsis, and incorporates powdered copper pigment that makes the paint appear darker until it catches the light. It’s complemented by mandarin orange accents below the Pantheon Grille, on the brake calipers and for the hand-painted coachline that runs down the side of the 5.4-metre long luxury limousine.
The same bright orange hue can be found in the cabin, with even the umbrellas concealed in the Ghost’s coach doors featuring mandarin piping. The Ékleipsis bi-coloured seats feature ‘unique perforated artwork’, with more mandarin orange revealed beneath the black surface layer by over 200,000 individual perforations.
There’s no orange in the timepiece on the dashboard, but Rolls-Royce did add a 0.5-carat diamond to the bezel of the one in Ékleipsis – a first for the company. It’s meant to recall the ‘diamond ring’ effect that occurs just before, and immediately after, the moon obscures the sun during a total solar eclipse.
Those all seem like small details compared to the car’s bespoke Starlight Headliner, which includes a special animation that took an entire year to develop. Once the doors are closed and the engine starts, the ‘stars’ in the headliner darken to replicate the moon completely blocking the light from the sun. Then a 940 of the ‘stars’ form a circle, to recreate the sun’s corona that’s only visible to the naked eye during a total solar eclipse, with an additional 192 ‘stars’ illuminating to represent the stars and planets not normally visible in daylight, except during an eclipse.
If that wasn’t enough attention to detail, the duration of the sequence – seven minutes and 31 seconds – is in fact the longest possible duration of a total solar eclipse. After that the full constellation of ‘stars’ in the headliner is restored. It requires 1846 to pull off the animation, with one person given the responsibility during each Ékleipsis’s production to adjust the size and position of each one – a process which took over 100 hours alone to complete.