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 - 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.