The modern car will pay homage to the Silver Dawn (pictured), a drophead introduced in the early 1950s as the first Rolls-Royce to be offered with a factory-built body. The luxury automaker was still only building the chassis into the ’40s, leaving the body to be added by third-party coachbuilders.
Like the Silver Dawn, the new car will be built for top-down, open-air driving. It is said to represent the next step in the company’s renaissance that began in 2003 with the launch of the Phantom and later introductions of the Ghost and Wraith, though additional specific details remain unclear.
“Our new Rolls-Royce Dawn promises a striking, seductive encounter like no other Rolls-Royce to date,” said Rolls-Royce chief Torsten Mueller-Oetvoes. “It will be the most social of super-luxury motor cars for those beautiful people who wish to bathe in the sunlight of the world’s social hotspots.”
Recent spy shots suggest the Dawn is likely the Wraith’s Drophead counterpart, originally announced in 2013 and now in late development. Pre-production prototypes have been spotted with a form that closely matches the Wraith, sharing the same headlights, LED light strips and rear-end, but with a more conventional coupe-like roofline rather than a fastback silhouette.
Power is expected to be provided by a 6.6-liter twin-turbocharged V12 engine, delivering around 620 horsepower to the rear wheels via an eight-speed automatic transmission.
Those ‘beautiful people’ will get a chance to pick up a new Dawn in the first quarter of 2016.
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