Rolls-Royce’s Newest Custom Droptail Is This Ultra-Exclusive Roadster

The Rolls-Royce Droptail family is almost complete.

The British ultra-luxury marque unveiled the third of four cars in the bespoke series on Thursday, the Arcadia. The coach-built roadster is just as opulent as its predecessors, but it’s got a number of features that stand out, including one of the more complex clocks we’ve seen from the brand.

The Droptail series made its debut last summer when Rolls-Royce showed off the La Rose Noire at Monterey Car Week. It was followed soon after by the Amethyst. All three cars—which are the first roadsters in the automaker’s modern history—are built by the Rolls-Royce Coachbuild division. Arcadia is named for the ancient Greek mythology’s concept of “Heaven on Earth,” and was designed to offer its owner sanctuary from the stress and noise of modern life.

The series’ third entrant was designed specifically for the Droptail’s graceful shape and lines. As such, its body has been finished almost entirely in white. The paint is infused with aluminum and glass particles that give it a shimmer and help create the illusion of “unending depth.” The effervescent hue is broken up only by a black hood and chrome trim, as well as the lower carbon-fiber sections which have been painted silver after having been left exposed on the first two cars in the series. There’s also the removable top which has been finished in black.

The interior is just as glamorous. It was designed with the owner’s aesthetic in mind and is of a piece with the residences and business spaces they own around the world. The tan and white space also features extensive woodwork—including a shawl panel that is the largest continuous wood section ever seen in a Rolls—that took 8,000 hours to complete.

The highlight of the cabin is the dashboard-mounted timepiece that took two years to design and five months to assemble, though. The clock wasn’t built by Audemars Piguet or Vacheron Constantin, unlike its predecessors, but its face features an intricate guilloché pattern in raw metal with 119 facets. The clock’s 12 individually machined hour markers were hand-painted using a camera capable of 100x magnification to ensure readability.

Rolls-Royce didn’t announce powertrain details, but the expectation is that the Arcadia will be powered by the automaker’s twin-turbocharged 6.75-liter V-12, according to Forbes. While it’s unlikely the owner will ever push the car to its performance limits, they’ll have plenty of power to work with. That mill is capable of producing 563 hp and 664 ft lbs of torque.

The other thing we don’t know about Arcadia is how much it will cost, and because this is Rolls-Royce, which takes the privacy of its customers very seriously, it’s unlikely we’ll ever have a concrete answer. Still, we can make an educated guess. One of the Droptail’s bespoke predecessors, 2021’s Boat Tail, was rumored to cost around $28 million. It’s unclear if the Droptail series cars cost quite that much, but it wouldn’t be a complete shock if they’re in the same neighborhood.