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.