The 12-year-old Rolls-Royce owner?!

In order to celebrate possibly the 'blingiest' Rolls-Royces ever to issue forth from the manufacturer’s factory, namely the Black Badge Ghost and Wraith models, a London-based dealer has come up with a list of supposedly amusing facts about Rolls-Royce orders throughout history.

Sadly, most of these are fairly dull – there’s a three-hour process just to hand over a new Roller, it takes five hours to valet every car before selling it, the painting process requires a week and 45kg of paint to complete and a series of 24 linkages and bearings are required to fold the Spirit of Ecstasy out of sight. Yawn.

However, a few of these factoids give a fascinating insight into a) the sheer tastelessness of the obscenely rich, and b) the eccentric oddness of this most revered of car companies.

Starting with the first category, did you know that one grotesquely showy individual has bought not one, but THREE Rolls-Royce Dawns that they’ll take delivery of in June? Because, of course, one €500,000 convertible is simply not enough.

Or are you aware that the youngest ever Rolls-Royce buyer in the world was a 12-year-old Taiwanese kid, who must surely be the very definition of the phrase ‘spoilt brat’? Then we have the customer in London who liked a t-shirt so much, he had his Rolls-Royce (model unspecified) finished in the colours to match. Doesn’t sound so bad, until you realise the car’s exterior was bright red while the interior was (gag!) bubble-gum pink. How classy.

However, what we really like is the weirdness of Rolls-Royce as a company. If the 1,300-watt, 18-speaker Bespoke Audio system is fitted to a Rolls, then interior designers wanting to make any alterations to the cabin have to seek the permission of the engineer who created the sound system first, so ‘exhaustively tuned’ is the set-up.

And that famous Starlight Headliner? It’s the most popular choice in the Rolls-Royce Bespoke catalogue. It can be configured into any constellation a discerning buyer would like, which requires the verification of a local observatory for sign-off, and getting your astronomical car feature just so requires 1,340 individually hand-woven fibre-optics in the roof and more than 2km of cabling.

So there you have it, the bonkers world of the super-rich. Kind of makes us glad to be poor, if we’re honest...

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