Danville Street Sighting - 1981 Rolls-Royce Corniche

Today is my friend Colin's birthday, so today I'm featuring a car he really likes. It's a 1981 Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible.

San Ramon Street Sighting - 1977 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow II

The Silver Shadow is still on my short list of favorite Rolls-Royce models. Really, it is a short list. Rolls hasn't made many cars that personally interest me in their illustrious 100-plus year history. Theirs is a reputation for quality, luxury, smoothness and silence. They build cars to a standard, not a price, and as a result the price is quite high - at least when new from the factory. Old Rollers are quite a bit cheaper.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1986 Rolls-Royce Silver Spur

When I was growing up, the name Rolls-Royce mostly meant two cars to me. One was the Silver Shadow, and the other was the Silver Spirit. The Silver Shadow and its convertible variant, the Corniche, was the quintessential modern Rolls of the 1970s. For the 1980s, the folks in Crewe rolled out the Silver Spirit and a long wheelbase model called the Silver Spur. Instead of making a Corniche replacement with the Spirit body, the old car soldiered on with updates well into the 1990s. The Silver Spirit itself was based on the outgoing Shadow, sharing the same floorpan and powertrain - including the GM 3-speed automatic transmission - but the body and interior were new. Rolls played it conservative, keeping what was good about the old car to maintain the famously smooth ride quality and "adequate" performance. Early cars sold in the U.S. came with quad sealed-beam headlamps as seen on this example, while the rest of the world got large, flush-mounted composite lights. The latter became standard in the U.S. market cars in later years.

Danville Street Sighting - 1959 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud II

All my life I considered it sacrilegious to cut up a fine luxury car like a Rolls-Royce or Bentley, particularly a classic one. It was one of the things you just didn't do. So of course, someone did.

Best of the Rest: The Brits

1967 Rolls-Royce Phantom V James Young PV23 Limousine, La Jolla

1969 Austin America, San Francisco

1969 MG MGB GT, San Francisco

1969-70 Jensen Interceptor Mk II, San Francisco

1974 Triumph TR6, San Francisco

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1967 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow

I don't often see vintage British cars parked on the street, especially not the finest British make of them all, Rolls-Royce. I suppose it makes sense that a hand-built luxury car like this 1967 Silver Shadow would survive four decades. At the same time, I'm a little amused. The Shadow was perhaps Rolls' first "modern" car, and yet it's kind of a parts-bin vehicle. The transmission is from GM, the hydraulic suspension is licensed from Citroen. Still, it was very advanced for its time, and looked current enough that Rolls would build it for fifteen years from 1965-80. The Silver Shadow was the most popular Rolls-Royce model in history, making this a relatively common car by Rolls standards - if you consider a total worldwide production of 30,057 cars over fifteen years "common". And that's including all the long-wheelbase models. When was the last time you saw one in daily-driver condition, street-parked, in as cutthroat and progressive a town as San Francisco? It's big, decadent, has a large, lazy V8 engine and doesn't have to answer to any stinking bureaucrats for pollution standards. I love it.

Auburn Street Sighting - 1947 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith

Now, I don't pretend to be any manner of expert on vintage cars. I know what I read and I read a fair amount. I go to car shows, do research and try to learn what I can. Unofrtunately I'm still useless under the hood. Most of the cars that have been featured here are mass-produced, usually middle-class models that can be researched on Wikipedia and HowStuffWorks.com.
And then there's this. As far as I can tell, it's a 1947 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, and it is an incredible car. These were the last "chassis-only" Rolls models, sold to customers without bodywork so they could commission a coachbuilder to fabricate a body to suit their own tastes. The coachwork on this car is likely supplied by Hooper, which according to JamesList (the craigslist of the super-rich, apparently) is one of the "more graceful and desirable bodies made" in the postwar era. The swoopy and dramatically curved bodywork with four (count 'em, FOUR!) suicide doors makes a statement of luxury and extravagance that sets it apart from other dowdy cars produced in the years immediately following World War II.