Absolutely incorrect. Watch e.g.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBIkJSpqcFsRolls-Royce’s cars are designed for use as service cars, in corporate/government motor-pools. They’re essentially the ultimate Uber car. Rich individuals are actively discouraged[1] from buying them to drive themselves. (They’re actually kind of crap for driving yourself in!)
If a rich individual owns an RR model, it’s always because 1. they have retained the services of a professional chauffeur, and 2. the chauffeur has requisitioned one, to use to serve their client’s needs better.
Ask any ridesharing-service driver who worries about customer-experience — the ones that deck out the back with TVs and the like — what they wish they were driving.
A few example features these cars have:
• a silent and smooth ride allowing for meetings or teleconferences to occur in the back seat (this “feature” is actually achieved through many different implementation-level features; it’s not just the suspension. For example, they overbuy on engines — or rather, overbuild[2] — and then RPM-limit them, so that the engine never redlines, so that it’ll never make noise. They make the car heavy on purpose, so that the client won’t even feel speedbumps. Etc.)
• A set of automated rear seat controls... in the front. You know who’s coming, you set the car up the way they’re expecting, quickly and efficiently. This includes separate light and temperature “zones”, in case you have a pair of clients with mutually-exclusive needs. Yes, you can deploy a rear side window-shade from the driver’s seat (presumably in response to your client saying they have a migraine or a hangover.)
• An umbrella that deploys from the driver’s door. This is there for the chauffeur, so they can get out first, have an umbrella snap into their hand, and then use it to shield their client from the rain as they open the client’s door.
• A sliding+tinting sound-isolation window between the front and back, controlled by the client in the back; but then an intercom which the front can use to communicate to the back despite the isolation window — but only one-way (i.e. the front cannot hear the back through the intercom.) Clients can thus trust that their chauffeur is unable to listen into their private conversations if they have the isolation window up.
• A lot of field repair equipment in the boot. These cars even have a specific (pre-populated!) slot for spare sparkplugs; plus a full set of hand-tools required to get at the consumables under the hood. The chauffeur or their maintenance person is supposed to populate this stuff when it’s been used; such that the driver is never caught without this stuff in the field; such that—at least for most problems the car might encounter—the car will never be stalled on the side of the road for more than a few minutes.
Etc etc. These cars (from which most “limousines” are cargo-cutting the look, without copying the features) are built from the ground up to offer features for chauffeurs to use to serve client needs; rather than to offer features clients use to serve their own needs.
Which is why these cars are expensive. They’re really not luxury items (as can be seen by the fact that they retain most of their value in the secondary market), but rather:
1. it’s just expensive to build a car this way, because these use-cases, and the parts they require, are somewhat unique;
2. the people who buy these cars — who are by-and-large not individuals, but rather are businesses/governments with a motorpool component — are willing to pay more to get something that can be used at sustained load for decades with low downtime and high maintainability; to serve many different clients with varying needs, changing configuration quickly and efficiently; and to offer a smooth and reliable set of amenities to said clients. In other words, motorpools buy these Rolls-Royce limos instead of forcing regular sedans into that role, for the same reason IT departments buy servers instead of forcing regular PCs into that role.
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[1] RR did build their Wraith model so they could actually have something to offer these people who wanted a Rolls-Royce car to drive themselves. But it’s really kind of a silly “collector’s model” — most people in the market for a luxury coupe wouldn’t bother with it. It’s just a halo product for gearhead collectors with RR brand loyalty.
[2] Rolls-Royce Motors, the car maker, is actually owned by their engine manufacturer, Rolls-Royce plc. RR plc exists to engineer and build engines and turbines for these sort of server-like high-reliability low-downtime SLAed use-cases, as in planes, rockets, power plants, etc. RR plc went into the car business for the same reason Tesla did: as a testbed and funding source for their powertrain technologies.