Fake In China: Rolls-Royce Phantom For $39,000
No, this is not a 1961 Rolls Royce Phantom. Fooled you. It is a ‘wedding car’ made by a Chinese company called Qingdao Soar Automobile. According to Carnewschina (which has more pictures,)
“This sort of car is mostly used for weddings and mostly in the countryside where farmers want to impress each other with their ‘Rollers’ (and later at dinner with the biggest cow on the table). City folk can hire a real Rolls Royce these days.”
Regular city folk rent Rollers. The well-to-do city folk has supercar weddings.
Ironically, the fake Roller is based on a stretched platform from the Brilliance BS6 sedan. It is powered by a Mitsubishi-sourced 2.4 four-cylinder with 136 hp – enough to drive bride and groom down main lu, while World War III worthy fireworks go off.
Why ironically? Brilliance is the joint venture partner of BMW in China, and BMW owns Rolls-Royce.
The price of a base-spec Soar RRO (Roller Rip Off) starts at around 250.000 yuan, or 39.000 US dollar.
This is the factory. Looks busier than the Rolls-Royce factory.
Original: It’s part of the Qingdao Soar collection. They probably used it for taking measurements.
Copy: They should have measured the rims also.
Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.
More by Bertel Schmitt
Comments
Join the conversation
"Why ironically? Brilliance is the joint venture partner of BMW in China, and BMW owns Rolls-Royce." Why is that ironic? For a start BMW don't actually own what is being copied here - to wit the badge, grille and emblem. They have a licensing agreement with Rolls-Royce plc to use them. BMW are not allowed to authorise use of said devices to a third party even if they wanted to. The infringement is therefore against RR PLC not BMW so there is no reason BMW should be concerned.
Well created motorcars are the inverse of the “55 foot car”, you understand, the one that appearance good at just 50 feet but looks even worse the closer you will get to it? While using the top end British marques, you are able to see the workmanship as well as develop quality from 40 feet away and also it solely will get better because you receive nearer... more information