Page 53 - Sharp: The Book For Men SS21

seat frames, for example, were initially found to resonate a different frequency than the body. The solution: adding dampers to harmonize the noise into a single note.
From the driver’s seat of the Ghost, road rage is an impossibility. It’s simply too serene; it’d be like getting mad while sitting on the beach under a palapa umbrella. The lengths to which Rolls-Royce’s small team of engi- neers and designers in Goodwood, England, have gone to achieve this effect — a rolling holiday — are hard to believe. Those sparkling, twinkling dots of light in the dashboard? Those took 10,000 hours and two years to develop. The gearbox, according to engineer Jonathan Simms, was designed to be almost invisible, so as to give off the feeling of one endless gear
(when, in fact, there are eight). Even more, the car scans the road ahead in real time and uses GPS data to set up the suspension and gearbox to never be caught out by a stray pothole or sharp turn.
But the biggest improvement between the new Ghost and its predecessors is something you’ll never see: the new sedan is built on the same custom aluminum architecture as the Phantom. On the new Ghost, even shock ab- sorbers have shock absorbers, just to make sure that whatever imperfections exist on the road never intrude into the calm world within.
To hear the company tell it, the original 2009 Ghost changed Rolls-Royce’s business forever by bringing an entirely new generation of young customers to the brand. To date, it’s
the most successful car in the brand’s 115-year history. It paved the way for a recent explosion of new models like the Cullinan SUV, Wraith coupe and Dawn convertible, as well as the Rolls-Royce Black Badge line, which has proven extremely popular with young clients, many of whom are in their twenties and thirties. The new second-generation Ghost is simply the latest in a long streak of vehicles from Rolls- Royce that are instant hits. No company is as in-touch with its customers as Rolls-Royce is, and it shows.
While it’s impossible not to marvel at Rolls- Royce’s unparalleled attention to detail, for drivers, doing so misses the point. And that is, of course, to simply relax and enjoy your rolling holiday.
I AM A GUTTER CREDIT.
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