Green BMW models give Rolls-Royce breathing space

When you buy a BMW i3, you won’t just be doing Mother Earth a favour -- you’ll be helping BMW sell big, thirsty V12 Rolls-Royce models for longer.

In the age of downsizing and greening up, of hybrid drivetrains and affordable two-seat electric city cars, when you’re up for a king’s ransom just to take your Mondeo into the City of London, Rolls-Royce looks a mite anachronistic.

Here we have a marque whose puniest engine is a 338kW 6.75-litre V12, quaffing more than 22.0L/100km round town at one end and belching 347g/km of CO2 from the other.

There are more powerful and fuel-efficient engines in Rolls’s seven-model line-up, comprising the new Wraith coupe, standard and long wheelbase Ghost sedans, standard and long wheelbase Phantom sedans plus the Phantom coupe and Drophead convertible. Its most frugal model is the standard Ghost sedan: 20.5L/100km urban cycle, 9.6 ex-urban and 13.6 combined, the latter yielding 317g/km CO2.

While they might be famously silent, nothing else about Rolls-Royce is inconspicuous. No model comes in under 2.3 tonnes, 5.2 metres long or 1.5 metres tall. The smallest standard wheel is 20 inches -- and that famous “magic carpet ride” relies on a decent tyre profile as well. Their sumptuous, high-tech interiors want for nothing, but should you want more, ask for it and there’s a good chance it’s yours.

If you have the cash, at least.

In Australia, today’s Rolls-Royce has a $609K buy-in threshold, but go down the bespoke path and you could very likely push even your base Ghost over a million bucks. A Drophead will cost you seven figures before you start looking at options.

That famed silence notwithstanding, there’s nothing modest under their bonnets either. The Phantom family sticks to the brand’s traditional 6.75-litre displacement, but in a V12 rather than the pre-BMW V8 formula. It’s good for 338kW/720Nm, enough to thrust it from zero to 100 kays in 5.9 seconds.

The Ghost V12 drops to 6.6 litres, but twin turbochargers bump up output to 420kW/780Nm, cutting the 0-100km/h sprint to 4.9 seconds. That means this 2360kg locomotive gives M3/RS4/C63 drivers a run for their (much less) money. Tweaks to the Wraith engine boost it again to 465kW/800Nm and just 4.6 seconds.

In short, pretty much everything about Rolls-Royce is kind of over the top -- small surprise they’ve found popularity among hip-hop gangstas and oil sheikhs alongside British nobility.

So… in the age of austerity, how on Earth do these monuments to conspicuous fuel consumption pass muster with legislatures getting increasingly narky on the matter of environmental footprint? With the EU pushing to get fleet CO2 averages below 95g/km by 2020, the good people of Goodwood have a way to go.

Fortunately for them, their residence under the corporate umbrella of the BMW Group gives them some room to move and some powerful advocates at the negotiation table.

Room to move because the European and US emissions measurement systems calculate their fleet averages by corporate group ownership, rather than individual brand. This allows umbrella companies like BMW and Volkswagen to use the one of their brands to mitigate excesses of others.

So BMW effectively apologises for Rolls with super-clean small diesels and, of course, the upcoming i3 -- zero (direct) CO2 emissions in EV form, with an ultra low-emission range-extender option. Volkswagen does the same for its Bentley brand via the up! and BlueMotion models; Detroit balances out GM’s Corvette with the Volt and Spark EV, and so on.

At the recent Wraith launch, Rolls-Royce executives hastened to point out a couple of other considerations to the marque’s benefit.

“Our volumes keep our overall [brand] carbon footprint tiny,” Asia Pacific regional director Paul Harris told motoring.com.au.

“I mean, 3500 cars last year in a global vehicle market of a couple of hundred million? We’ll only ever be tiny.”

He admitted the company has had buyers query the brand on matters environmental.

“Of course, but look, you’ve Japanese brands who’ve traded heavily on hybrids with batteries known to pollute very heavily,” he continued.

“We invite people to come to Goodwood and check Rolls-Royce out first hand -- our plant is extremely energy efficient. Our production line isn’t even electric -- staff push partially completed cars from one production phase to the next.

And it’s not as if the marque hasn’t tried alternative power. It was only three months ago that it lay to rest any idea of all-electric power, mothballing the Phantom-based 102EX EV (pictured) in the face of massive customer apathy.

Billed as the world’s first ultra-luxury EV, it debuted two years prior amid considerable fanfare at the Geneva motor show. The company has toured it extensively since, running it past its customer base worldwide, to no avail.

“We expected it to be better received, but no one wanted it,” Rolls CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös told media in April.

Talking to us, Harris was more sanguine about it.

“102EX was a test bed for us, of what an electric[-powered] Rolls could be. In our customer research, it polarised people -- some loved it, most said nope, I’m a V12 man, I don’t do much mileage, not interested,” Harris explained.

“The thing is, electric power is so well suited to Rolls-Royce: near-silent drivetrain with all its torque on tap straight away.”

The major issues appear to have been brand dilution and -- just as predictably -- range. Rolls-Royce was claiming 190km, but with 660kg of battery under the bonnet, the reality was going to be less than 160km.

“But it did give us a whole lot of data that will in time inform the decisions we make about future drivetrains, no doubt about that,” Harris said.

According to analyst/news site Edmunds, Müller-Ötvös is on the record favouring plug-in hybrid power as the way to go. But at the Wraith launch, Harris said any such announcement is some way off.

“I’m talking about three years or more. Nothing’s in, nothing’s out at the moment,” he said.

“The company is fortunate to have at its disposal the constantly evolving raft of technologies emerging from Munich.”

Asked what factors might influence such decisions, he pointed first to regulation.

“Obviously that’s going to be a big influence. But we also simply have to move in the direction the market is moving,” Harris concluded.

Direction is one thing, speed is another. Some things never change.

Read the latest Carsales Network news and reviews on your mobile, iPhone or PDA at the carsales mobile site