Inside Rolls-Royce: The World's Most Exquisite Factory

It takes workers at the Maruti Suzuki factory in Delhi, India, 12 hours to transform a few sheets of steel into a salable automobile. Every day 3,500 cars roll off the production line at 17 second intervals into a vast car park with spaces for up to 5,000 vehicles. Producing cars exclusively for the newfound wealth of the East though they may be, Maruti’s approach is fairly typical of mainstream carmakers. It takes Ford only an hour longer to build the Fiesta, and this is a European-built car designed to meet the expectations of demanding Westerners.

Maruti build as many cars in a day as Rolls-Royce do in a year.

How long do you think it takes the fabled marque to lovingly handcraft a £300,000 Phantom? A week? More like a month, provided you order à la carte (which only 20 per cent of customers do, anyway). Granted, these are two shockingly dissimilar carmakers, but they’re both benefiting from the exact same economic boom. Maruti makes cars for factory workers - Rolls-Royce make cars for factory owners.

As we were at Rolls’ Goodwood HQ last week checking out the new Rolls-Royce Wraith, we thought it’d be rude not to have a poke around the factory too, and find out what makes their cars so much more than just outrageous displays of wealth, and why they take so damn long to build.

Sir does not appreciate being kept waiting, you know.

“The beauty is in the detail” is a phrase you’ll have heard one too many times, yet it seems as though it was coined specifically for Rolls-Royce - a company so fiercely proud of its heritage it’s since developed its own lexicon. The “Surface Finish Centre” - don’t call it the paint shop - is where the bare-metal chassis spend their first seven days at the plant.

If you’ve got the means to foot the bill, you can have your Rolls painted in any colour you wish. Bile yellow? Sure. Lime green? Absolutely. One customer even had his Phantom colour-matched to his dog. When asked what he’d do if the dog died - he replied he’d simply “get another car”. If a customer specifies their own, unique colour, Rolls guarantee that the colour won’t be used on any other car. Rowan Atkinson, for example, owns “Blackadder Blue”. It cannot be used again without his permission. Rolls will even do a matt finish if the customer desires, although the tiniest scratch in the paintwork means the whole car would need respraying at a cost of £30,000 or thereabouts.

It’s not the colours that set Rolls apart though - given most exotic manufacturers offer a colour match service at a price - it’s the quality of the finish. Once the five layers of paint have been applied, along with two coats of lacquer, a team of workers hand-polish each car for five hours to a mirror shine - highlighting any imperfections, some barely the size of Wayne Rooney’s brain, for immediate rectification. Think you have good eyesight? You don’t.

No less attention is paid to the cars’ interiors, either. Rolls source their leather from the Alpine Region of Germany. Though there are fences capable of nicking a bull’s hide, the bulls themselves don’t go anywhere near them for fear of tumbling down a cliff-face. And yes, bulls. Cows have unsightly stretch marks from carrying their young. A Ghost typically requires eight hides - these must all be sourced from bulls from the same herd to ensure the grain of the leather is as consistent as possible.

There are 48 individual pieces of wooden trim in a Phantom. Each piece is made up of 28 layers of wood (interspersed with pieces of aluminium so they don’t splinter under load) - with the finish mirrored across the width of the cabin. The wood itself is sourced from all over the world - the teak used for the decking on Phantom Dropheads comes from Burma. It can take up to a month to perfect the finish for the cars’ wooden components.

At the very end of the build process, the cars enter the “Bespoke” workshop - 80 per cent of customers opt for some form of personalisation. Customers have specified a safe in the boot, and fully-stocked wine cellars suspended from the car’s frame. One Japanese man asked that a microwave be fitted in the back of his Phantom, allegedly so he and his guests could enjoy hot, refreshing towelettes. US billionaire Michael Fuchs “really enjoys challenging us

”, says corporate comms man Andrew Ball. Fuchs’ cars are an example of how far the company will go to satisfy its customers - his Phantom Drophead is yellow. Even the interior - yellow.

Coach lines are a popular option. They’re hand-painted by one man, Mark Court. He’s the only man in the world capable of painting a six meter line along the length of a Phantom - completely freehand. For this reason, he’s only had one holiday in the last several years. Court’s 15 year-old son is said to be pretty good, too. Rolls are hoping he’ll follow in his father’s footsteps.

You don’t truly “get” Rolls-Royce until you’ve been in one of its cars. Understanding how one machine - albeit a £300,000 machine - can be worth such time and effort is tricky without experiencing the final product first hand. They’re exquisite, fantastic cars that suitably reflect the marque’s mystique. And if I’m ever in a position to buy one, I’ll be first through the door.

That, or 200 Marutis. Just for the fun of it.

Images, Tom Harrison, Maruti & Rolls-Royce.