our worst car is the best compared to other car makers,king of them all the Rose Royce phantom.....for me i think the attention to detail is undiluted

Most large, flagrantly premium cars feel like a lifeless parody of luxury. In much the same way a peripheral friend's stag do can feel like a lifeless parody of fun. Everything's there - the visual pheromones, the carefully curated events, the vast expense, the testicular performance - but it's a bit… empty.

This is an experience Rolls-Royce dedicates millions of hours (and pounds) militating against, even with its bargain-basement, volume-selling Ghost model, which has just had a delicate breathe-over for the Series II iteration. But as you'll have probably (hopefully) gathered, these terms are somewhat relative. It costs £218,000. That's £148,000 more than Mercedes' new benchmark land yacht, the S-Class. Or, in petrosexual currency, 5.6 Golf GTIs. Nevertheless, the manufacturer will sell three of them for every one of its plutocratic £305,000 Phantom flagships, and it hopes to find homes for more than 4,000 this year following record sales since it launched it in 2009.

For such an important model in its line-up, you'd be forgiven for asking exactly what's changed - on the surface at least the styling's hardly a radical departure. Outside the modifications are minutiae - slimmer LED headlights, a reshaped bumper, a grille raised by 30mm, new creases pinched into the front wings, and the Spirit of Ecstasy radiator mascot's been canted forward by seven degrees. It's excruciatingly considered stuff, but parked next to the first-gen car it's immediately less boorish, more dynamic.

Inside the adjustments are even more intricate and stunning in their fiendishness. The rotary controller that lets you navigate through the sat-nav, upgraded (and colossal) sound system, wifi (it's its own high-speed hot spot), and television settings (the company eschewed a touch screen system because it leaves unsightly fingerprints on the screen) has a crystal glass lid with the same pinch functionality as an iPhone. The radius of the curve on the stitching on the full-grain leather chairs match front and rear. No two of the wood veneers are the same pattern. The company didn't think an existing watchmaker could do quite as good a job of timekeeping as its engineers so it built its own before finding it a home in the dashboard. It's a level of superlative tinkering and genteel feng shui that allows you to discover something new and engaging every time you sit in it.

Driving 2470kg of inequality, however, is a lot less engaging. In a good way. Hiding under the bonnet there's a 6.6-litre V12 with 563bhp and 575lb ft of torque that trickles along with a silent, innocuous whir. But if you bully it it'll hit a limited top speed of 155mph and get from 0-62mph in 4.8 seconds. That's faster than a Ferrari F355 Spider. Which, plainly, is ridiculous, especially considering its impeccable day-to-day road manners. Helped, allegedly, by a clever Satellite Aided Transmission that analyses GPS data and your driving style to select the appropriate gear from the eight-speed automatic 'box. It's a confidence trick par excellence because the shifts are so smooth and unobtrusive that you actually wonder if exists at all, which either means it's working incredibly well or not at all. Regardless, it does exactly what it's supposed to incredibly well. Point it where you want to go, press the throttle and it'll get you there as quickly as you like.
All told, Rolls-Royce has succeeded in building a car that transcends the definition of a luxury vehicle. And that's just as well. The Ghost, which is as British as the empire (we shan't dwell on the fact it uses a lot of tech from parent company BMW) and roughly the same size has to offer something more. Its innards can't be witlessly covered in wood or leather. Every stitch needs a story and every millimetre needs a great deal of the very cleverest thought, otherwise it's just another car and just another empty parody.