Published:
17 May 2023Although it has been written on countless occasions that the loudest thing inside the cabin of a moving Rolls-Royce is the ticking of the analogue clock on the fascia, it’s not strictly true here.
That’s not, however, because there’s sufficient noise ingress in the Phantom to drown out such a thing – far from it. It’s because the clock in this car doesn’t ‘tick’ at all. It has no second hand. And even if it did, you can bet it’d be truly in keeping with everything else about this car – by being the quietest-operating in-car time-keeping instrument you’ve ever encountered.
The Phantom’s mechanical refinement is genuinely incredible and totally exceptional. Sitting in the front seats as we habitually do to measure a car’s noise level, just a few feet from an idling 6.7-litre V12, you’ll genuinely struggle to hear that engine at all. It isn’t that it’s quiet: measured at 34dBA, it’s as good as silent, since the ambient open-air hum of most modern urban environments will register higher than that on a noise meter.
At a 70mph cruise, the Phantom produces just 60dBA of cabin noise, split fairly evenly between distant road noise and gentle wind rustle, with the engine almost inaudible except when it’s called on to knuckle down. Both the Bentley Mulsanne we tested in 2011 and the Mercedes S350 Bluetec we benchmarked in 2013 produced fully 3dBA more (and remember, at that level, half a decibel of extra background hum is enough to be noticeable).
