According to Rolls-Royce, all of its customers have Chauffeurs, and when you cater to the one-percent, there’s no room for semi-autonomous technology. It’s not for Rolls-Royce customers. At least not until it’s truly effortless and then it’ll be ripe enough for the typical Rolls-Royce client. While the statement above makes Rolls sound about as stuck up as the people it builds cars for, its reasoning does have some merit. The fact is that for customers that do have Chauffeurs (I’m definitely not saying all do, but a good portion surely do) it wouldn’t make sense to pay your very own Alfred to sit around and do nothing, waiting for an instance where he’ll have to take over.

Will Rolls-Royce Ever Have a Self-Driving Car”?

Rolls CEO, Torsten Muller-Otvos, told Car & Driver, “As you know, we are part of BMW Group, and BMW is investing big money into autonomy. For that reason, we are able to take that technology whenever it is ripe for our customers. It’s important to understand that not just many but all of our customers do have chauffeurs, if not permanently employed then somebody they can call and say, ‘Bring me to the opera tonight,’ or ‘Drive me and my friends to the restaurant.’ That is not a problem. And we will only bring autonomy into our cars if it is truly effortless.”

With that in mind, Rolls-Royce does see level 5 autonomy being a part of its future… someday. It’ll be when it truly is effortless, and there’s no need to hire anyone to take over every now and then. At that point, it almost seems kind of obsolete anyway. If every single one of its customers always rides in the back seat, then they already experience about 90-percent of what self-driving cars are all about – sitting back and enjoying the ride, doing business, drinking wine, or whatever else they might do, without having to worry about driving themselves.

Final Thoughts

It’s probably safer to say that Rolls-Royce will embrace autonomy when it has to. It will probably come after one of two events – either it’s overly wealthy and stuck up customers will express the notion that they don’t want to pay a driver anymore or governments will ban cars that aren’t level 5 capable 100-percent of the time from all roads. Either way, Rolls will just tap into BMW’s technology, obviously, and suck up all it can to make its customers happy. And, for what it’s worth, I wouldn’t expect a self-driven Rolls to look anything like the 2016 Vision Next 100 (also known as the 103EX.) Of course, all those trust fund babies and overly spoiled customers are sure to get what they want so maybe that is what a self-driven Rolls will look like. I guess we’ll just have to see what happens.

References

Read our full speculative review on the 2019 Rolls-Royce Cullinan.

Read our full review on the 2016 Rolls-Royce Vision Next 100.

Read more Rolls Royce news.