“The launch of a new Rolls-Royce is an historic event,” says CEO Tom Purves as we sit down to dinner at West Stoke House in bucolic West Sussex, only a few miles from the Rolls-Royce factory on the Earl of March’s estate at Goodwood, and in the very room where design chief Ian Cameron and team spent three months working on the Phantom back in 2000. Not as historic event as it perhaps once was, though: The 2011 Rolls-Royce Ghost sedan is the fourth new Rolls-Royce to appear since the imperious Phantom rewrote the rulebook for super-luxury cars in 2003. Or, to put it another way, Rolls-Royce has now launched as many new cars in the 11 years since BMW snatched the storied marque from under the nose of VW Group boss Ferdinand Piech as it had in the previous 50.
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