Who Owns Rolls-Royce Motor Cars?

Charles Stewart Rolls and Frederick Henry Royce met at the Midland Hotel in Manchester on May 4, 1904. Rolls was a motor dealer and aviator from an aristocratic Welsh family. Royce was a self-educated engineer from Lincolnshire who had built a small car of his own design and found it significantly superior to the imported vehicles he had previously owned.

The two men reached a commercial agreement: Rolls would sell every car Royce could make, and all cars would carry the Rolls-Royce name. Their partnership was formalized in 1906 with the incorporation of Rolls-Royce Limited. That same year, the company exhibited the Silver Ghost at the Olympia Motor Show in London. The Silver Ghost ran for 15,000 miles under RAC observation in 1907 without a mechanical failure, earning it the description "The Best Car in the World" from the motoring press of the day.

Henry Royce designed the Merlin aero engine in the 1930s, which powered the Spitfire, Hurricane, and Lancaster bomber during World War II. This military engine work cemented the Rolls-Royce name in British industrial history but also set the two business streams, cars and aerospace, on increasingly divergent paths. Charles Rolls had died in a flying accident in 1910, the first British fatality in a powered aircraft crash.

The postwar decades were difficult for the car side of the business. Rolls-Royce Limited entered receivership in 1971, primarily because of cost overruns on the RB211 jet engine contract for Lockheed. The British government nationalized the company and later split it: Rolls-Royce Motors became a separate entity in 1973 and was eventually sold to Vickers plc in 1980. Rolls-Royce plc continued as the aerospace and defense business.

Vickers sold Rolls-Royce Motors in 1998. BMW and Volkswagen Group both bid. Volkswagen, paying 479 million pounds, won the auction and acquired the physical assets including the Crewe factory and the Bentley brand. BMW paid only 40 million pounds to Rolls-Royce plc, the aerospace company, for the rights to the Rolls-Royce name and logo as applied to automobiles. Volkswagen held a temporary license to use the Rolls-Royce car name through 2002.

BMW used that transition period to commission a 100 million pound manufacturing facility on the Goodwood estate in West Sussex. The Phantom VII debuted at the Detroit Auto Show in January 2003 and entered production at Goodwood in the same year. It was the first genuinely new Rolls-Royce since the Silver Shadow of 1965.

Under CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös, who led the company from 2010 to 2023, Rolls-Royce expanded its model range substantially. The Ghost sedan arrived in 2009. The Wraith coupe and Dawn convertible followed in 2013 and 2015 respectively. In 2018 the company launched the Cullinan, its first SUV, which immediately became the brand's highest-volume model. Record annual deliveries of 5,586 vehicles were achieved in 2022.

In 2022 Rolls-Royce launched Spectre, its first fully battery-electric model. In 2023, the brand set an all-time delivery record with 6,032 vehicles. 2024 saw deliveries fall to 5,712 vehicles, which the company attributed to deliberately slowing production to avoid oversaturation and protect residual values, alongside a strategic focus on increasing the per-unit Bespoke content value rather than volume. Chris Brownridge succeeded Müller-Ötvös as CEO in December 2023.