At roughly $3 million, the Bugatti Chiron is one of the most expensive production cars to ever reach showrooms, so the words “affordable” and “Bugatti” rarely, if ever, occupy real estate in the same sentence. However, that’s what happened over the weekend.
On Saturday, Rolls-Royce unveiled a one-off custom build called the Sweptail. At a reported price of nearly $13 million, it is believed to be the most expensive new car ever commissioned, The Telegraph reported.
While it may not be quite as pricey as the most expensive car of all time – a $38 million Ferrari 250 GTO – the Rolls is still the price of four brand-new Bugatti Chirons.
For Rolls-Royce, the Sweptail represents a return to prominence of the brand’s time-honored coach-building business.
"Sweptail is the automotive equivalent of haute couture," Giles Taylor, the director of design for Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, said in a statement. "It is a Rolls-Royce designed and hand-tailored to fit a specific customer."
And it's the result of four years of work.
According to Rolls, a customer approached the company in 2013 and asked it to build a one-of-a-kind motor car inspired by the luxury yachts of the 1920s and '30s.
The Sweptail's signature feature is a single-piece glass roof that tapers into the car's fastback rear end. It's a design feature that dominates the car's overall silhouette.
Rolls-Royce has not released technical specs of the car. However, the Sweptail is believed to be based on the current generation Phantom platform, which means some version of the company's 6.75 liter, V12 is lurking under the car's long bonnet.
