The Rolls-Royce Lineup, Explained — and What an LA Fleet Actually Holds

Rolls-Royce sells four cars. Not fourteen, not a family tree — four. The reason the range looks bigger than that is a vocabulary sitting on top of it, and nobody explains the vocabulary.

Most people arrive at this question having seen five or six names and assumed each one is a separate car. They are not. Two of them are the same saloon at different lengths. Two more are trim levels wearing their own badge. And two of the names people still search for hardest are cars Goodwood stopped building, which is why they turn up on rental sites and nowhere on the manufacturer's own configurator.

So here is the range as it actually stands, in the order that matters — body first, badge second — followed by the part that gets skipped everywhere else: which of these you can realistically get your hands on in Los Angeles, and why the answer is shorter than the list. Three of the six are in our own Rolls-Royce fleet, and we will say which three before the halfway mark rather than at the end.

The whole range on one screen

Four in production. Two out of it. That is the entire lineup, and every other name you have seen is a variant of one of these six.

Read that ladder twice and the shape of the marque falls out of it. Rolls-Royce builds two saloons of different sizes, one SUV and one electric coupe, and it deleted the petrol coupe and the convertible in the same year. There is no small Rolls-Royce, no estate, no four-door convertible, and nothing under the Ghost. The range has no entry level, which is deliberate — a company that sold a cheap Rolls-Royce would stop selling expensive ones.

Two saloons, and size is only half the difference

This is the pair people confuse, and the confusion is reasonable, because from thirty feet the two cars share a grille, a bonnet ornament and a silhouette. The distinction is what each one is for.

The Phantom is the flagship. It is rear-wheel drive, it is enormous, and every design decision in it assumes the important seat is the back one — reclining rear chairs, a fold-out table, and a rear compartment tuned to be quiet rather than involving. Car and Driver's own summary of the smaller car makes the hierarchy explicit: if the Ghost is not roomy enough, its review of the Rolls-Royce Ghost points readers up to the flagship, which is larger, rear-driven and dearer.

The Ghost sits below it and drives differently on purpose. All-wheel drive, a shorter body, and a chassis Rolls-Royce set up for an owner who takes the wheel themselves. Both saloons are also built on a stretched wheelbase, which is the next piece of vocabulary and the one that causes the most confusion.

Black Badge, Extended Wheelbase, Series II: what the words actually mean

Four terms do most of the work in a Rolls-Royce listing, and three of them are routinely written as though they were separate models.

• Extended Wheelbase (EWB). The same car with roughly 220 millimetres let into the middle of it, all of which goes to rear legroom. A Phantom Extended is not a different model; it is a Phantom with a longer back door. If you have seen one described as a distinct car, that is a listing error.
• Black Badge. A darkened trim level with the chrome blacked out, the Spirit of Ecstasy in black, more power and a firmer chassis tune. It exists across several model lines and it is a specification, not a body. Our Cullinans are standard cars, not Black Badges.
• Series II. A mid-life facelift. Rolls-Royce uses the term the way other companies use a model-year refresh, and it changes lights, screens and details rather than the shape.
• Coachbuild. The one-off department. Cars like the Boat Tail and the Sweptail are built in ones and threes for a named client on an existing platform, and they never carry a list price. They belong to a different conversation entirely — one about what a Rolls-Royce costs to buy rather than what the range contains.

Learn those four and roughly ninety per cent of the apparent complexity in the range disappears. What is left is four bodies.

The SUV that changed who buys one

The Cullinan arrived in 2018 and did to Rolls-Royce what the Cayenne did to Porsche: it doubled the number of people for whom the badge was a practical purchase rather than an indulgence. Five seats, all-wheel drive, a tailgate, a hip point you step across rather than lower yourself into, and rear doors that still swing backwards so the theatre survives intact.

It is the only Rolls-Royce in our garage that Goodwood is still building, which has a consequence people do not think about until they need it. Parts, software and factory support for a current model are a different proposition from parts for a car that left the line three years ago, and that is quietly why an SUV is the easiest Rolls-Royce for anyone to keep on the road in a city like this one.

There are two of them here, a black car and a white one, and the colour is a real decision rather than a preference — the white car is the easier photograph under a hard midday sun, the black one holds an edge after dark.

The coupe and the convertible both stopped in 2023

This is the part of the range that confuses everyone, because two of its best-known cars are not in the lineup any more and nothing on the manufacturer's site acknowledges that they ever were.

The Wraith was the fastback two-door: 624 horsepower from a 6.6-litre twin-turbo V12, the longest bonnet in the range, and two rear-hinged doors long enough to become a genuine logistics problem in a tight garage. Rolls-Royce ended it and put the electric Spectre in its place — same two-door proportions, no engine, and a fundamentally different noise, which is to say none.

The Dawn was the four-seat convertible, built from 2015 to 2023 on the same underpinnings, with a six-layer fabric roof designed to make the car as quiet closed as a saloon. It has no announced replacement at all. Since the manufacturer's showroom no longer carries a page for either car, the archive is the authority now rather than the factory: the Dawn's production record is where the dates, the engine and the Black Badge specification are still written down.

Which of the six exist in a Los Angeles fleet

Here is the honest map, because it is the question the range explainer exists to answer and almost nobody answers it.

Model	Body	Status at Goodwood	In our Los Angeles garage
Phantom	Saloon	In production	No
Ghost	Saloon	In production	No
Cullinan	SUV	In production	Yes — two, black and white
Spectre	Electric coupe	In production	No
Wraith	Coupe	Ended 2023	Yes — one, black
Dawn	Convertible	Ended 2023	Yes — two, black and matte white

Three of six, five cars, and that is the whole of it. We would rather write that line than sell you a saloon on a page and then telephone you about an SUV, which is the sequence that produces the worst conversation in this business.

The saloons being absent is not an accident of our buying, either. The two four-door cars in the range are overwhelmingly bought to be sat in the back of and are the natural stock of chauffeur operations rather than self-drive fleets, so the LA market for them is a driven-car market. If a rear seat and a driver is genuinely what the day needs, our chauffeur service pairs a driver with the Cullinan, which has the high roofline and the wide rear doors a saloon is usually chosen for in the first place.

So which body do you actually want

If you want that decision made properly rather than in three lines, we wrote it out at length in the Cullinan, Wraith and Dawn comparison — doors, seats, roofs and colours, with the caveats.

The three model lines we keep, and where each one lives

Three models, five cars. Each has its own page, its own photographs and its own calendar:

Two of the three come in a choice of finish, which is the second half of the decision and the half most comparisons skip: the white Cullinan against the black one, and the matte white Dawn against the black. The matte finish kills reflections, which makes it the most requested car we have for daytime work and the least flattering one in a dim garage.

If the badge is what you came for and the body is still open, start with the shape — an SUV, a coupe and a convertible solve three different evenings, and the rate spread between them is narrow enough that it should not be the deciding factor. What the three actually cost here, and what the deposit and the delivery come to, is set out on the Rolls-Royce rate page.

Every Rolls-Royce in the fleet → Where the Cullinan sits among the luxury SUVs →