While most Chinese customers order their Rolls-Royces in one of the many shades of black they have, the Pinnacle Travel Phantom uses a much more exciting combination of the finest woodwork and a two-tone exterior finish.
I've actually seen this car before but didn't realize it until now. It was parked next to a Waterspeed Droptop at the factory when I had the chance to visit. But even if its color combination reached my brain, the marquetry stayed hidden on the assembly line.
There are three levels of customization you can choose from at Rolls-Royce:
The first is what you could call an options list. You tick the right boxes and your car gets done fairly quickly.
One step above are the limited edition cars. These are completely bespoke but designed by the factory instead of the buyers. Collectors pick them up faster than a Chinese restaurant can deliver General Tso's Chicken.
At the top of the range, there's Rolls-Royce Bespoke, where you can have everything. Just ask Michael Fux, who bought so many they named a yellow paint after him.
The Pinnacle Travel Phantom was built to 'celebrate China's love of travel and the success of Bespoke in China,' as apparently Chinese people travel more nowadays than any other nation.
It features a Madeira Red/Silver Sand paint job with a Madeira Red coach line featuring an "abstract motif of a streamlined train traveling at speed". And guess what? Since we're talking about China, Infinity Black/Silver Haze or Melanite/Palladium color schemes will also be available.
But what's important is on the inside. While the exterior colors match the cabin's with a number of Morello Red and Seashell leather combinations for seats, the roofliner, pillars, door cards and the lamb's wool floor mats, the really impressive part is what the wood shop came up with.
They call it the pièce de la resistance, and its the most complex and intricate marquetry ever seen inside a Rolls-Royce.
It was created by laser-cutting 230 individual pieces of the finest woods to end up with a motif of "a cross-continental train speeding across a landscape with plumes of steam left in its wake."
The same motif continues onto the door cards through 24,633 individual stitches, presumably just to keep the leather shop busy as well...