Rolls-Royce’s Bespoke division is exclusivity personified, and the highest rung in that ladder is Coachbuild—which goes far beyond selecting unique colours or interior finishes and gives customers the chance to help design their own new cars.
The first of the Coachbuild cars was the Phantom-based Sweptail, hand-built over four years, reportedly for Hong Kong businessman Sam Li. It has a dramatic fastback roof that was a hit when revealed to the public in 2017. Rolls didn’t confirm the car’s cost, but some reports said more than US$12 million. The Sweptail has been spotted on the road in Europe.
The Boat Tail, shown (above) in 2021 and built on the Architecture of Luxury platform with Phantom V12 power, was the first commission from a consortium of three couples. It’s a unique convertible with a carbon-fibre parasol that opens to shade its occupants during al fresco parties. Beyoncé and Jay-Z are reported Boat Tail owners. Argentine footballer Mauro Icardi is said to be another keeper of the keys. The purchase price of these cars is around US$28 million, sources say.
There will be a total of four Droptail roadsters created, and these now include the Amethyst Droptail and the La Rose Noire Droptail, each with unique rear-deck treatments and personal detailing throughout. The newest, third commission is Arcadia Droptail, which will come with a removable hardtop (and no soft top). The car will be delivered to an international client in Singapore, said Rolls’ Americas spokesman, Gerry Spahn. The price tag is likely in Boat Tail territory.
Arcadia was known in Greek mythology as a place of “Heaven on Earth.” The one-off car has a vivid recessed wood-panelled rear deck that took 8,000 hours to create, according to the company, and recalls vintage Chris Craft power boats—or woodie station wagons. It’s in left-hand drive, reportedly to better facilitate its use around the world. Rolls used a 3-D environment to show the client how the car would look in various locales.
“Coachbuild commissions like Droptail Arcadia are immediately the classic Rolls-Royce collectibles. Coachbuild is more than Bespoke, it’s the ultimate personal statement,” says Martin Fritsches, president of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars in North America.
Alex Innes, head of Coachbuild Design, added (in a statement) that the Arcadia is “one of the most faithful expressions of an individual’s personal style and sensibilities we have ever created within the Coachbuild department.”
Design inspiration for the Arcadia came from sky gardens in Singapore, Indonesia, and Vietnam, in addition to British “biometric” architecture.
The white paint is infused with aluminium and glass particles to give it depth and shine. The lower sections of the Arcadia Droptail are in carbon fibre, painted silver. The wood on the rear panel is mirrored on the dashboard (in Santos Straight Grain veneer), door linings, and central armrest. The wood pieces were mounted on stiff bases developed using carbon-fibre layering techniques derived from Formula One racing.
The hardtop, in a contrasting dark colour, slants down to a short rear greenhouse, giving the car a racy look. The doors are rear-hinged, with prominent chromed handles. The nose and grille are somewhat rounded, with narrow horizontal headlights, yielding a more aerodynamic prow than is customary in Rolls-Royce history.
The dash’s crown jewel is a clock with a face that took five months to assemble, after two years of development. Its raw metal geometric guilloche pattern has 119 facets. Rolls describes it as “the most complex Rolls-Royce clock face ever created.” The hands are partly polished and partly brushed, and have 12 hand-painted “chaplets” (hour markers) that are only 0.1 millimetres thick.
Many automakers are establishing bespoke divisions, but Rolls-Royce is, per tradition, taking it further than others.
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Growth in size of U.S. market gives him extra leverage in trade negotiations with other countries
Donald Trump will retake office in a global economy substantially transformed from eight years ago—one much more reliant on the U.S.
It means that the president-elect’s plans, including across the board tariffs, could pack an even greater wallop on other countries than the first round of “America First” economic policy. It also gives Trump much more leverage in negotiations over trade policy.
Strong growth since the pandemic has expanded the U.S.’s weight in the global economy. Its share of output among the Group of Seven wealthy nations is higher than at any point since at least the 1980s, International Monetary Fund data shows.
Growth in China, the world’s second-largest economy, has slowed. Germany, the largest European economy, is contracting. Many poorer economies are buckling under the weight of high debt.
U.S. gains in global output partly reflect the strong dollar, which pushes up the value of American output relative to that of foreign economies. But they also result from substantial increases in U.S. productivity compared with the rest of the world.
The changes in the global economy have made America, not China, the premier destination for foreign direct investment, enlarging the exposure that foreign companies have to the U.S. economy and changes in government policy. A booming U.S. stock market has attracted huge flows of investment dollars.
“The fact that much of the rest of the world is now struggling to generate demand on its own provides more reason for countries to try to reach some sort of accommodation with Trump,” said Brad Setser , a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Trump started imposing tariffs in 2018, primarily on China but also on Europe and other allies. Those tariffs fractured global trade, weighing on large exporting economies in Asia and Europe, while not obviously hurting the U.S., which is less reliant on foreign demand than its trading partners. Trump campaigned on a promise to impose at least a 60% tariff on China, and an across the board tariff of 10% to 20% on everywhere else.
America’s superior economic performance has been driven in part by energy independence and massive government spending, said Neil Shearing , chief economist at Capital Economics in London. Since the U.S. now exports more energy than it imports—including millions of barrels of oil each month to China—the nation as a whole benefits when energy prices rise, unlike for net importers such as China and Europe.
The upshot: America’s traditional role as the centre of gravity in the global economy has become even more pronounced in the years after Trump’s first-term tariffs, the pandemic, and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
U.S. influence over Europe’s economy is a case in point. The U.S. has cemented its position as Europe’s largest export market as trans-Atlantic trade surged in recent years and China’s imports from Europe stalled. The U.S. has replaced Russia as Europe’s major source of imported energy. Europe runs big trade surpluses with the U.S. but big trade deficits with China.
The result is access to the U.S. market is far more important for Europe than access to European markets for the U.S. That asymmetry will give Trump leverage in trade negotiations with Europe, according to economists.
Germany exports around 7% of its entire manufacturing value-added to the U.S., but Germany imports only around 0.8% of value-added in U.S. manufacturing, according to a September paper by researchers at Germany’s Ifo Institute for Economic Research.
“German business is vulnerable to Trump,” said Marcel Fratzscher , president of the Berlin-based economic research institute DIW Berlin.
Parts of Asia have benefited from the changes in supply chains sparked by Trump’s initial trade war with China. Many manufacturers, including Chinese ones, moved factories to places such as Vietnam and Cambodia. For the past two quarters, Southeast Asia’s exports to the U.S. have exceeded those to China.
But that now leaves them more exposed to across the board tariffs, a policy that Trump advisers say will be necessary to force manufacturing back to the U.S.
To be sure, Trump’s policies could create countervailing forces. Tariffs would decrease imports and potentially weigh on productivity, but tax cuts would drive up household and business spending, including, inevitably, on imports. Other countries could retaliate by placing tariffs on U.S. goods.
Meanwhile, a tight U.S. labor market has pushed up wages, which is good for those workers. But it could pressure employers to raise prices, in turn making them vulnerable to foreign competition.
Many economists are girding for a different type of trade war from Trump 1.0, when trade fell between the U.S. and China but was diverted elsewhere.
“As long as protectionism refers only to one country, China, the world can live with this,” said Joerg Kraemer , chief economist at Commerzbank. “The thing becomes difficult or dangerous if you implement tariffs on all countries. This would be a new era in global trade.”