High-riding Rolls lands in Oz

Meet the ultimate family taxi - a $685,000 SUV capable of taking you off-road in absolute luxury.

The Rolls-Royce Cullinan, the British uber-luxury brand’s first ever SUV (although Rolls prefers the term ‘High Sided Vehicle’), arrived in Australia for official presentations to potential customers.

And that price is only the starting point as customers can choose from an almost endless amount of options including more than 40,000 paint colours to tailor the Cullinan to personal tastes. That means customers could end up spending more than $1m to get their ideal Cullinan.

“The bespoke limit is your imagination,” explained Ian Grant, Rolls-Royce global client sales manager. “We’ve had customers put gold in the paint before, we’ve had crushed diamonds in paint before. These type of features have a cost that is quite different to that $685k, really we live it to the customer to decide their bespoke nature and where the price heads from there.”

Rolls-Royce has exclusively offered limousines, coupes and convertible models until now, sothe move into the booming SUV market is set to expand the brand’s sales, as Grant explained it has attracted new buyers alongside existing owners.

“Here in Australia we’ve had an interesting response from both sets,” he said. “Our current customers have been looking at this car saying ‘Fantastic, I can really see this adding to my garage’ and that’s wonderful because these customers are quite familiar with the Rolls-Royce story, the bespoke capabilities and the design features our cars have.

“The other side of that is we’re seeing new customers coming to Rolls-Royce brand for the first time. So we can have these fantastic stories with them all over again, our bespoke capabilities, what our cars are capable of, the ‘Magic Carpet Ride’, the handmade craftsmanship that comes with the vehicle. At the moment it’s been an absolute split of current customers and new customers coming to the brand.”

The Cullinan is powered by a 6.7-litre twin-turbocharged V12 petrol engine that makes 420kW of power and 850Nm of torque. That performance is channeled to the road via an all-wheel drive system that Rolls-Royce has thoroughly tested off-road, so the Cullinan isn’t a soft-roader.

Grant believes its extra capability will fit in with the Australian lifestyle for off-roading and outdoor sports.

“The Cullinan lends itself to bring Roll-Royce into that picture as the pinnacle of the luxury SUV world.”

The Cullinan will go into production in September, with Australian customers set to begin taking delivery in early 2019.