Rolls-Royce considering SUV

Comments by Rolls-Royce CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös at the Frankfurt motor show point to a future SUV or crossover vehicle carrying the Spirit of Ecstasy.

And given the place the BMW-owned British super-luxury brand has occupied in the auto market virtually since its beginnings, it’s likely to be the costliest high-rider ever.

“We are intensively thinking about entering the SUV segment,” Mr Müller-Ötvös told media at the show.

"The SUV segment is very interesting – it’s been incredibly stable during the crisis, and I think a luxury niche will develop.”

He’s on to something there. Benz raised eyebrows with its first M-Class in 1997; Lexus less so when it launched its first-generation RX the same year.

Rolls-Royce’s parent company, BMW, had pundits wondering in the lead-up to the X5’s release in 1999. But everyone was happy after they drove it, especially the buyers in the US market that inspired it.

When Porsche followed with the brutish Cayenne, the initial shock and revulsion somehow transmogrified into a handsome hike in sales.

That’s the trouble with SUVs – they’re big, they’re rarely pretty, but they sell a bomb. If the Porsche brand was ever in imminent danger of extinction, the Cayenne certainly did a whole lot to keep it from the brink.

If anyone was going to hold out against this incursion of vulgar Americanism, it was the British luxury saloon brands and the upmarket Italians. But no – even Ferrari made a half concession with the FF a couple of years back.

And so the upward creep continues. Ferrari sister brand Maserati has not just capitulated but gone the full hog, so to speak, with the announcement that next year’s Kubang sits on parent conglomerate Fiat Chrysler’s Jeep Grand Cherokee platform.

Jaguar has all but confirmed it will be joining the fray in 2016 with a crossover built on an all-new lightweight platform.

Even Lamborghini’s signed up, announcing intentions to launch its Urus – an SUV bearing very Lambo lines – in 2017.

Actually, the bull’s had a crack at it before, with a child’s drawing writ large called the LM002. Just over 300 examples of the luxed-up V12 dual-cab ute were made between 1986 and 1993. The most famous example belonged to Uday Hussein, son of Saddam. After his death at the hands of the US military in 2003, Uday’s Rambo-ghini was blown to bits in a car-bomb simulation exercise.

The trend advanced another rung up the luxe ladder when, in 2012, Bentley released images of its EXP 9 F concept. Sitting on the same platform as other product from parent company Volkswagen – the VW Touareg, Audi Q7, Porsche Cayenne – it was widely derided as one of the more unsightly examples of the genre.

Nevertheless, the marque turned the heat up on Rolls with the announcement that it’s going public in 2016, albeit with a toned-down version of the EXP concept, which drew less than complimentary attention.

All of this leaves Mr Müller-Ötvös and his colleagues in Munich and Goodwood wondering if the time might not have come to jump into a pool they’ve eschewed to date.

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