Ghost, Phantom, Cullinan, Wraith, Dawn: What Actually Separates the Five

Almost everyone arrives at this question with the right picture in their head and the wrong name attached to it. The five are not variations on a theme — they are five different answers to five different evenings.

The confusion is earned rather than careless. All five wear the same grille and the same figure on the bonnet. Four of them use a version of the same 6.75-litre twin-turbo V12. And since 2017 the modern cars have shared one aluminium spaceframe underneath — the Phantom, the Cullinan and the current Ghost are built on the same structure, which is why they photograph as relatives even when they are nothing alike to sit in.

What separates them is the part no specification sheet leads with: how many doors, which way those doors open, whether the roof comes off, and whether the important seat is the front one or the back one. Get that right and the name follows automatically. This piece sorts the five by those questions, then says plainly which of them are in Los Angeles and which are not. Three of the five are in our own Rolls-Royce fleet; two are not, and you will know which before you are halfway down the page.

The five side by side

	Phantom	Ghost	Cullinan	Wraith	Dawn
Body	Saloon	Saloon	SUV	Coupe	Convertible
Doors	4	4	4	2	2
Seats	5	5	5	4	4
Engine	6.75L V12	6.75L V12	6.75L V12	6.6L V12	6.6L V12
Horsepower	563	563	563	624	563
Drivetrain	RWD	AWD	AWD	RWD	RWD
Long-wheelbase version	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
Status	In production	In production	In production	Ended 2023	Ended 2023
In our garage	No	No	Two	One	Two

Notice how little the performance column decides. Four of the five make the same 563 horsepower, all five are limited to the same 155 mph, and the fastest of them reaches 60 mph roughly four tenths of a second ahead of the slowest. Nobody has ever noticed that difference on Sunset Boulevard. Every real distinction in this table is in the top four rows.

You are probably picturing one of these five things

This is the fastest way through the question, because it starts from what you actually saw rather than from a model name you are trying to match to it.

• Two doors, both hinged at the back, and no roof at all. That is the Dawn — a four-seat convertible with a six-layer fabric roof that folds away entirely. If the picture in your head has sky in it, this is the car.
• Two doors, both hinged at the back, and a long fastback roofline running to the tail. The Wraith. The most powerful of the five at 624 horsepower, and the one with the longest doors of anything the company has built in the modern era.
• Four doors, a very long back seat, and somebody else at the wheel. The Phantom. It is the flagship and it is rear-wheel drive, and every decision inside it assumes the owner is in the back. Car and Driver's own verdict on it is blunt about that — its Phantom review notes the car is best experienced as a passenger.
• Four doors, and the owner driving. The Ghost. Smaller than the flagship, all-wheel drive, and set up for somebody who wants to take the wheel rather than be conveyed. This is the saloon most people mean when they say "a Rolls-Royce" without meaning anything more specific.
• Tall, five seats, a tailgate, and you step across into it. The Cullinan. It is the SUV, it arrived in 2018, and it is now the model that brought most owners to the marque in the first place.

Five pictures, five names, and no specification sheet required. What follows is the detail on the two comparisons that are genuinely hard.

The two saloons: the only pair where the choice is genuinely close

This one is decided at a dealership rather than in our garage, and it is worth understanding anyway, because it is the distinction that makes the rest of the range legible.

The Phantom is the top of the company. It is rear-wheel drive, it is the longest car here by a wide margin, and the extended-wheelbase version adds a further 220 millimetres of which every one goes to the back seat. The rear compartment is the point: reclining chairs, a table, and a cabin tuned for silence rather than for the person steering.

The Ghost sits a step below, and it is a different proposition rather than a cheaper one. Shorter, driven through all four wheels, and tuned around the person holding the wheel instead of the person behind them. It is also the quieter car socially, which for a certain kind of owner is the whole argument — one of these two announces itself from a hundred yards away and the other does not.

Both are built at two lengths, and the long ones are where nearly all the miscounting of this range begins. An Extended Wheelbase car is the same car with about 220 millimetres let into its middle, every one of them handed to the rear passengers. It is not a separate model and it never was.

The coupe and the convertible: the roof is not the whole difference

Here the two cars really are close, because they were designed as a pair on the same underpinnings, and here the difference matters to a booking rather than to a purchase — both are in our garage.

The Wraith is the fixed-roof coupe and the more theatrical car standing still: a fastback line, an enormous bonnet, 624 horsepower, and two rear-hinged doors that are long enough to become a real problem in a tight subterranean garage. Rolls-Royce ended production in 2023 and the manufacturer's showroom carries no page for it any more, so the Wraith's production record is where the dates and the specification are now kept.

The Dawn is the four-seat convertible on the same architecture, 563 horsepower, and it is the better car in this city for the plain reason that Los Angeles has a coast road and good light. Both seat four honestly rather than nominally. Both take a real effort to climb into the back of.

Choosing between those two is a decision with enough in it to deserve its own page, and it has one — doors, seats, roofs, colours and the caveats are all in the Cullinan, Wraith and Dawn comparison, which is the piece to read once you have narrowed it to the three we hold.

The sixth name you keep running into

The Spectre is the electric two-door that took the Wraith's place in the range in 2023. Two doors, four seats, coach doors, no engine, and roughly the same footprint. It belongs in any honest account of the lineup, and it belongs nowhere in a Los Angeles fleet conversation, because it is a current car that owners are still taking delivery of. Nobody in this city has one on a self-drive fleet, including us.

Which three of the five are in Los Angeles

The short answer, before the section that explains it: the SUV, the coupe and the convertible. The two saloons are not here.

If what the day actually wants is a back seat and somebody else steering, the honest substitute is not a four-door at all. Put a driver from our chauffeur service in the SUV instead: it stands taller, its rear doors open wider, and stepping out of it in formalwear takes no athleticism whatsoever. That last part is usually the real reason a saloon was on the list.

The three, with their own pages

Five cars across three model lines. Each has a page of its own, with the dates that car is free:

Two of the three exist here twice, which does more work than a colour swatch: the white Cullinan and the matte white Dawn are second cars as well as second finishes, so on a Saturday in spring they are frequently the difference between a yes and a no. The coupe has no second car behind it.

If the shape is settled and the question is now what it costs, the Rolls-Royce rate page carries the live figure for each of the five cars. If you are still deciding between the three we hold, the comparison piece is the one to read next.

Every Rolls-Royce in the fleet → The full lineup, including what Black Badge and EWB mean →