Royal Rides
will carry the newlywed Royal couple.
A royal wedding always means regal rides, and Britain’s Prince William and his fiancé Kate Middleton plan to uphold tradition when it comes to their April 29 nuptials in London.
Kate and her father Michael will be ferried to stately Westminster Abbey in one of the many classic Rollers (that’s Brit-speak for Rolls-Royce) kept tuned and polished in the royal mews garage. The vehicle in question is a custom-built 1977 Phantom VI, a Silver Jubilee edition marking Queen Elizabeth’s 25th year on the throne. It features a raised roof, the better for the common folk to see their rulers. Though sometimes that’s not quite what they may want; this very car recently underwent a bit of a restoration after it was attacked—while squiring about Prince Charles and his wife Camilla—by a mob angered by the government’s plan to raise school fees. (Where’s Bond’s impenetrable Aston Martin DB5 when you need it?)
Once married, the royal couple will switch to an elegant gold and red vehicle boasting precisely four horsepower—the number of equines necessary to pull the Queen’s classic 1902 State Landau carriage, the same one famously used by William’s mother Diana during her wedding to Prince Charles in 1981.
But please, enough of this esoteric stuff. Where’s the real muscle in the royal fleet?
It starts with the Queen’s newish Bentley State Limousines, bespoke Arnage-based machines powered by twin-turbocharged, 400-hp, 6.7-liter V8s (the better to outrun those disgruntled masses perhaps). When the Queen wants to low-key things, she’s usually driven around in a Jaguar XJ. Meanwhile her son Charles has been spotted about in his Bentley Turbo R, a series of Range Rovers (the perfect car for those Scottish hunts) and (shhh) even an Audi (the British royal family does after all have German roots).
What’s notable though about Charles’ fleet is that many of his cars have been modified by royal garage-smiths to reflect his longstanding passion for environmentalism (once mocked for telling a documentary crew that he spoke to plants to help them grow, Charles was named one of the world’s top greenies by Time magazine in 2007). Many of his cars run on biodiesel, while one particular V8 Aston was converted to run on surplus white wine. Waste not, want not.
If any of England’s royal crew were to shop around for new rides, a few models with robust British traditions (though not, in most cases, British owners) come to mind. First on the list has to be the new Bentley Supersports Convertible, an absolute rogue of a topless, four-seat superstar. Besides proffering blinding performance in the tradition of the old Bentley Boys of the 1930s, this car boasts flex-fuel credentials that would endear it to the future king.
Aston Martin may scream “posh” a bit too loudly for low-key William and Kate (at one point, rumors circulated that their post-wedding dinner would simply be a buffet), but Aston Martin’s newest ‘vert—the Virage Volante—could prove mighty enticing for great escapes into the backroads of the realm. And lastly, let’s not forget Lotus, whose recent rebirth likely has the late Colin Chapman giddy. That company’s new Malaysian owners have grand plans for the brand’s line-up. But even if those come to naught there’s always the compelling Elise to covet, a lightweight slot car that the new prince and princess would do well to scream around in before they are compelled to grow up and grow bored in the back seat of all those silent royal limos.
Marco R. della Cava has written extensively about cars for publications such as Automobile, Robb Report, and USA Today, where he is a staff writer covering popular culture.
