How Rolls-Royce uses thousands of tiny etchings and fiber optics to fill the $330,000 Ghost with starscapes

• The $330,000 Rolls-Royce Ghost isn't just an ultra-luxury sedan whose driver's seat is meant for either owners or chauffeurs. It's a big, fancy display of light and shadows.
• From the shooting-star headliner to its glowing front grille, the Ghost is full of little details — fiber optics cut by hand, laser-etched surfaces — that make its whole light display come together.
• Henry Cloke, the lead exterior designer on the car, discussed those details during the car's September launch in Austin.
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When it comes to Rolls-Royce, the devil and the glory alike are in the details. The automaker is so obsessed with the little things, in fact, that discussing them all would take far more words than any mortal has the time for. The company's 5,000-word press releases prove that much. 

But on the new, $330,000 Rolls-Royce Ghost, there's one feature of which Rolls is particularly proud: giving the car a sort of simple warmth to help balance all of its various design and engineering influences.

"If you have a car that is just super technical and cold, it doesn't feel like a Rolls-Royce," said Henry Cloke, the Ghost's lead exterior designer, at the car's September launch in Austin. "If it's over flamboyant and it doesn't feel sincere, it also doesn't feel like a Rolls-Royce. So a huge amount of it is finding that balance point." 

That warm balance came partially from the car's plays on light and shadows, which could easily be overlooked as "pretty car with a pretty glow" by us normal folks. But every fiber of the Ghost's lighting came down to the minute detail. 

There are its body lines and newly created paint colors, sculpted to make a simple shape look dramatic and mixed to accentuate that drama. There's the fiber-optic night sky lighting the car's shooting-star headliner. There's the glossy "GHOST" display in front of the passenger seat, lit and polished perfectly to mimic the night sky on the ceiling. There's the car's imposing front grille, lit softy and warmly enough to make it look almost unintimidating to casual passersby.

"The light and shadow thing — there is obviously first the overall form of the car," Cloke said. "Although there are very few lines, the surfaces actually have kind of convex and concave bits, and you need paint with a certain level of interest in it that really shows you that light and shadow."

Cloke said some paints, like the "Tempest Grey" seen on the car in these photos, were made specifically for the new Ghost to "really reflect those shapes" and "give an attitude to the car." How paint looks is a big focus for Rolls, which has a fancy lamp that can be adjusted to show buyers what their paint will look like under the sun anywhere in the world. 

On an overcast day in Austin, it looks like this. 

Coming across a new Ghost at night will draw your attention toward its glowing new grille — something Cloke described as "that kind of Rolls-Royce presence, but in a really understated way."

"We wanted it that if you were driving in the evening, you could have this warm glow," Cloke said. "It's not like a big, bright light. We didn't want to have a sort of super techie blue light that sounds futuristic."

Rolls uses stainless steel instead of chrome for the Ghost's slatted Pantheon grille, but quickly learned that it would need some adjustments to get the perfect glow. 

"When it reflects the light, you get this slightly warm color," Cloke said. "But our first iterations were much too much too bright, because if you fully polish everything and then add light, it didn't fit with this calm mood we wanted to create.

"That's why you'll notice the back of all of those individual veins have actually been sandblasted, so they're effectively matte on the backside and gloss on the front side."

Also new on the Ghost is a twinkling display in front of the passenger seat, complete with more than 850 light-up imitation stars and a glowing "GHOST" logo. Rolls-Royce said the feature was "developed over the course of two years and more than 10,000 collective hours," and can be turned off and on.

But those stars? They aren't on a screen. Everyone has a screen these days, and Rolls-Royce drivers aren't everyone. 

"The illumination itself comes from 152 LEDs mounted above and beneath the fascia, each meticulously colour matched to the cabin's clock and instrument dial lighting," Rolls-Royce said upon announcing the new Ghost, adding that more than 90,000 laser-etched dots create "a twinkling effect as the eye moves across the fascia." 

Cloke said the goal with the 850 stars, just like with Rolls' famous starlight headliner, was to make them random but realistic. All of the dots can't be the same size or they won't look natural, yet all need to have a certain balance to them.

The surface displaying those stars is made up of three layers, including a high-gloss finish to make the surface smooth despite the etched surfaces underneath. That way, if an owner turns the stars off, it'll be like they were never there.

"I think so much of the technology was really important that it's not in your face, it's just there if you want it," Cloke said. "It just creates that mood or it gives you that function, but you're not confronted by it all the time."

The fascia is an extension of the starlight headliner, often imitated with aftermarket mods but always synonymous with a Rolls-Royce. While it's been around a lot longer than the twinkling display up front, the headliner is just as complicated to create. 

"Everyone takes it for granted, but actually, we've put stars on the roof of a car," Cloke said. "There are more than 1,000 fiber-optic cables that have to be put in by hand, and then what makes the star feeling is all of those fiber optics are then cut by hand with scissors at slightly different angles. 

"That means that you're not always looking at a completely 90-degree cut fiber optic, because if you did, they would all look as bright as each other and [be] the same size dots. The reason that it feels starlike is because there's a certain randomness in it."

Sure, you could boil a Rolls-Royce's lighting down to "pretty car with a pretty glow." But that would ignore just how many hands have a role in creating each light feature, from sandblasters to paint specialists to the folks cutting individual fiber optics with scissors. 

And those are just the people involved with the lighting, not the ones perfecting stitches on the leather or melting the steel used for the Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornament, which can duck away into the car's bonnet if you try to swipe it. (Good try, though!)

So, when you really think about it, the devil isn't in the details — Rolls-Royce is. But you might just have to make a deal with the guy to afford the payments.