As is the custom: the ultimate in bespoke car making

Let’s start with some numbers. Not the reported ￡12m a notionally anonymous patron paid earlier this year to have Rolls-Royce build him a one-off car,a figure that makes that vehicle – the Rolls-Royce ‘Sweptail’ – the most expensive new motor ever sold. Close behind it in the all-time list of absolutely crazy new-car prices are a string of one-off Ferraris. And lawd only knows how much one very well-connected McLaren customer paid that company to build him a car that looked unlike anything else the company (or any car manufacturer come to that) was building, and did so just months after McLaren first went into the road-car business and presumably needed some compensation for the distraction.

Once upon a time, when bundling an engine and transmission onto a rolling chassis was the work of the arriviste automobile-ists, while making a body for said engine was the reserve of some honourable guild of coachbuilders, many cars were pretty much unique. These days, one-off cars are again a thing. And they are almost unimaginably expensive. Until now, you would be hard-pressed to name nine significant one-off cars built bespoke cars this century. Or in the second half of the last, come to that. The Sweptail, however, increasingly seems like a harbinger of the next big trend. For wealthy car buyers a ￡2.5m Bugatti Chiron — the world’s most expensive production car is a little common and…a little cheap.

‘There is a view among patrons of luxury,’ says Torsten Müller-?tv?s, CEO of Rolls Royce, ‘that personalisation separates true luxury houses from practitioners of acquisitional mass luxury. As our business has evolved in emerging markets we’ve seen a proportionate increase in the number of Rolls-Royces commissioned with bespoke personalisation.

‘In 2016, we proposed an entirely coachbuilt future with the introduction of the Rolls-Royce 103EX concept vehicle. This was informed by an understanding that tomorrow’s patrons of luxury will demand true personalisation in the goods they seek to commission. Though it’s impossible to generalise, for our patrons it’s more about a desire to curate, commission and collect.’

Marek Reichman, executive vice president and chief creative officer at Aston Martin agrees: ‘It’s vital to understand that to the ultra-rich their legacy matters–and that social media now means that’s a living legacy. Commissioning a one-off automobile is no different from commissioning an architecturally interesting house or curating an art collection.’

Neither Rolls-Royce nor Aston Martin promote their coach-built service. Ferrari does, having set up its Special Projects division in 2007 in response to a customer going rogue and commissioning his own one-off from Ferrari’s now largely former partner in the design and manufacturer of bodies, celebrated Italian carozzeria (coachbuilder), Pininfarina.

The P4/5 was commissioned by New York-based movie producer James Glickenhaus to celebrate Ferrari’s late 1960s Le Mans car, the P4. He supplied a Ferrari Enzo along with the concept and an awful lot of money, and the result was spectacular, winning plaudits globally, if not in Maranello, home of Ferrari. It’s fair to say that then Ferrari president Luca Cordero di Montezemolo was incandescent, demanding of Glickenhaus the prancing horse badge and insisting any mention of Ferrari be removed. ‘It didn’t matter,’ a Ferrari spokesman told Telegraph Luxury, ‘whether the car was well received or not, Ferrari didn’t have control over its manufacture so it’s no different to us than the limo company owner in Glasgow who stretched one of our cars to take teenagers to proms. It’s no longer a Ferrari.’

Di Montezemolo and Glickenhaus ultimately buried their differences and Special Projects began production of one-off cars for very select clients at a rate of just over one vehicle a year. Ten cars displaying varying degrees of visual harmony with the mainstream cars have been made public, most famously in 2012 the 458/512 Boxer mash-up dubbed the SP12EC, where the SP stands for Special Projects and the EC for Eric Clapton.

Demand for SP cars runs at roughly 10 ‘one-off projects were in many ways a lifeline for Aston Martin in the 1970s and ’80s – the Victor Gauntlett years. Victor made sure there was an ongoing supply of one-off, coach-built Astons heading in the direction of the Sultan of Brunei’s garage and in return a dependable and regular flow of cash.’

But it is a question of balance: ‘Aston Martin Lagonda has two unique coach-built cars being built and will continue to take commissions at a rate of just under one a year,’ he continues. ‘That seems about right given the demands they make on the design and engineering teams and their value to the business relative to the regular production cars.’ times Ferrari’s capacity to build one-offs given it’s a two-to-three-year process that involves design director Flavio Manzoni and the customer approving first a one-quarter sized clay model of their car and then a full-sized clay before manufacture begins. Getting on the list takes commitment: buying new Ferraris; getting your classic collection maintained by the factory;taking part in racing programmes. ‘You can’t just throw money at us,’ they say. For others, unique cars are a part of the recent past. At Aston, Marek Reichman says.

In 2011, McLaren Automotive was a start-up, still learning how to make its first supercar, the 12C. That broke new ground with its internal structure – the ‘Monocell’ – which used race-car engineering from the company’s F1 cars.Think of it like the concrete core of a contemporary skyscraper, soaking up the loads of the exterior that hangs off it. One customer close to the project was quick to see the potential and the extraordinary X-1 - utterly unrecognisable as a 12C - was the result. It’s therefore key in understanding how 21st-century ways of building cars are enabling this renaissance in coachbuilding.

‘Coachbuilding was very much the norm in the first half ofthe 20th century,’ says James Banks, head of sales at McLaren Special Operations (MSO). ‘Individual companies would “coachbuild” on to car manufacturers’ chassis, but the advent of unibody chassis construction [like almost all modern cars,where the body is the structure] broadly wiped out the industry.

‘McLaren’s key enabler is our Monocell carbon-fibre chassis technology. Essentially all the crash and bending loads are borne by the Monocell, with the body having little need to bear structural loads. It’s why our spiders [convertibles] are as stiff as our coupés, and Monocell allows huge design freedom.’

Fabricating that un-loaded bodywork in carbon-fibre has similarly enabled the return of coachbuilding, although in the case of the McLaren X-1 many of its new surfaces were created from shaped or milled aluminium and titanium. ‘Making something out of aluminium is maybe 10, 12, possibly even more, times expensive than making it out of carbon fibre’ says Banks. ‘But cost just wasn’t an issue with the X-1, you can see it has unique lamps – creating a new lamp design can cost anything up to￡250,000. ButX-1 was about pure expression. It was an intense process –a car like that can take 40,000 hours to build. The car on which it was based takes just 11 days.

‘I remember the design-concept sessions and our head of design asking, “What if this car was a person?” The answer was Audrey Hepburn. And “if this car was an instrument?” A grand piano. It was an extraordinary process.’

In the meantime, Banks’ charmingly old school workshops, housed in the building from where McLaren used to run its F1 team before moving to its ￡300m Norman Foster-designed HQ on the other side of Woking, is fit to burst with no less impressive, personalisation projects. On the schedule are bespoke paint jobs(ombré is the new in-look); interior trim (at Rolls-Royce personalised cars have all-silk interiors, and all new Phantom VIIIs offer an art space in front of the passenger); aerodynamic modifications (think race cars); and enhanced mechanicals(think faster).

Many are making a second visit to MSO, their owners addicted to the process, but in the new 21st-century automotive landscape when the ultimate status is a totally unique car, they’re strictly gateway drugs. ‘We’ve had plenty of requests for one-offs since the X-1 but the chemistry hasn’t been quite right,’ says Banks. ‘But there are now two commission cars in development at the moment, and a number of other projects in discussion. Honestly, you ain’t seen nothing yet.