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Rolls-Royce Phantom Metropolitan Collection wafts into the annals of exclusivity

Limited-edition, hand-built cars are kind of a bizarre thing. On the one hand, people pay umpteen amounts of money for bespoke cars, with the manufacturer adding that iconic descriptor to all its press materials, but then the company goes and produces 20 of the exact same car and sells them as a "special edition." It seems kind of contradictory.
Rolls-Royce must not see it that way, though, as it has just unveiled one of 20 Metropolitan Collection Phantom sedans at the 2014 Paris Motor Show. As the latest member of the brand's Bespoke Collection, the Metropolitan joins the Phantom Drophead Coupe Waterspeed Collection, the Pinnacle Travel and the Ghawwass Edition.
According to Rolls-Royce, the Metropolitan Collection pays "homage to the world's great metropolises" by way of the company's well known craftsmen. The veneers, particularly on the second row picnic table, get extensive attention, with just the table using 500 individual pieces of wood.

Neglected Rolls-Royce Phantom may be the saddest of all time

Rolls-Royce prides itself on exemplifying the pinnacle of automotive elegance. The brand is synonymous with quality and luxury. However, in the end even a Rolls is still just a car, and if you don't keep it up, it's bound to fail. That deterioration can be seriously fun to watch, though.
This 2005 Rolls-Royce Phantom might now be one of the worst cars on the planet and only has a little over 95,000 miles on it. The video claims that the original owner in New Jersey didn't make payments on the car for three years but rented the sedan out to people and used it for a livery service. Now, it's repossessed and would probably cost more to fix than it's worth.
This Phantom has had a hard life. We don't want to spoil too many of the broken pieces because they pile up to become increasingly absurd. However, the pièce de résistance must to be the broken Spider-Man umbrella in the door.

Rolls-Royce planning one or two new models based on the Ghost

Fourteen years after Volkswagen bought Bentley, its English brand has two distinct lines, Mulsanne and Continental - with numerous variants at the Continental's lower price point - an SUV on the way and perhaps a sports car and a Mulsanne convertible, too. In the 14 years since BMW bought Rolls-Royce, its English brand has the Phantom and Ghost - with three variants at the Phantom's much higher price point. Rolls-Royce doesn't chase sales, but the difference in the brand direction helps explain why Bentley has sold more cars in the first six months of this year than Rolls-Royce sold all of last year.
And even though Rolls-Royce isn't solely about the tally, it would still like to improve on the 3,538 cars it sold last year - a sales record that eclipsed a mark set in 1978. To do so its CEO is planning one or two more Ghost-based models beyond the as-yet-unnamed Ghost Coupe due next year, perhaps to be called the Corniche, according to a report in Autocar. A convertible version of the Ghost Coupe is the obvious guess for one of them, and it would get the double-R "closer to 4,000" sales, where the CEO would like to be.
Sales might not be the only part of it, though; the headline of the Autocar piece says the CEO wants the new models because they're "required to give Rolls-Royce a proper identity." If that is accurate, we have no idea what kind of identity Rolls-Royce could be missing that would be served by a wider range of cars in the Ghost range, which by their place in the brand's own lineup are admittedly not the most opulent carriages on the planet.