GUC KING OF HEROES DRIVERS

The materials are almost beyond description: only a few rogue buttons and the media screen layout highlight any BMW parts sharing, and everything from the copious swathes of wood to the thickly piled carpets (I’ve never had anything as plush in my house) will make you feel so, so good. Otherwise, though, it’s as supreme as you’d hope. There’s only one USB port, and it’s located very unhelpfully if you wish keep your phone charged while using a sat nav app. If it all gets a bit much, the roof can be operated at up to 30mph, though given the sheer size of it, the mechanism does take a little while. But let’s blame Britain’s wintry weather for that rather than the car. Roof up, the silence is zen-like, and full-size adults will still be comfy in the back.Ībove 50mph and things can get a little cold and blustery if the soft top is folded, however.

Get the hang of it and you can carry some serious pace across country roads.Įqually, of course, you can settle down, using the smallest smidgen of its ‘Power Reserve’ gauge possible (rev counters are so unclassy) and enjoy what a masterfully refined car this is. The trick is not taking lots of speed into a bend – there’s simply too much mass for that – but to carefully turn in and, once the car has obliged, use an indulgent amount of throttle so that the rear squats down and you ride that wave of luxurious speed out of the corner.

Yet once you realise there’s plenty of grip hiding beneath all those cocooning layers of comfort, you can have a go at driving this thing quickly.

GUC KING OF HEROES DRIVERS

At first, it feels like Rolls is doing everything it can to throw keen drivers off the scent: the steering is super slow, there’s no option to manually control the gears, and there’s barely any engine braking when you lift off the throttle, so you heave on the hard-working brakes more than you’d like. Push the accelerator all the way down – the pedal travel is “are you sure you want drive so uncouthly quickly?” long – and with all 575lb ft available from just 1,500rpm, you’ll be fired along exceedingly rapidly.But get accustomed to the Dawn’s size – its large wing mirrors mean you can point them down to show where the lane markings are, while still seeing everything behind you – and it’s a fun car to build speed and confidence in. My first few hours guiding the ginormous feeling Dawn around are pretty tentative, then. The overly large steering wheel contains barely a jot of feel, while the biggest bumps you can find will all be smothered entirely by the suspension. In fact, every element of the Dawn smoothly irons out anything one might consider “feedback”. There’s barely a muster of engine noise, no sense that turbochargers are boosting its output The top speed is an electronically limited 155mph.īut so desensitised is the Dawn that it’s all bewilderingly drama-free. ‘Lower’ still translates into 563bhp and 575lb ft of torque, mind, enough to propel the Dawn from 0-62mph in five seconds. It’s shared with the Ghost saloon and Wraith coupe, but uses the former car’s lower output. The engine is a 6.6-litre V12, mounted surprisingly far back under that front bonnet. And that’s what so utterly beguiling about it.

Lord no, but nor is anything the Dawn does. You can use a slimmer opening, of course, but ingress and egress will be so much more glamorous when you caddishly stroll up, step into the interior, and swing the door electronically shut with the touch of a button. You notice how large the Dawn is merely by how long it takes to walk from one end to the other, while the wonderfully over-engineered, rear-hinged doors demand a lot of room as they swing open to nearly 90-degree angles from the car. There’s rather a lot of car here – the Dawn is 5.3 metres long, 1.9 metres wide. Especially with prices starting at a not inconsiderable £264,000.

After all, Britain loves an open-top car, despite the meteorological issues one is likely to suffer driving one with the roof stowed.īut if any car can eradicate the unpleasantness of this country’s unreliable climate, it ought to be the Dawn. Probably, but this is the first time we’ve driven the latest Rolls-Royce convertible on UK roads.

Guc king of heroes