The Rolls-Royce Dawn Isn’t Just Inspired By Music, It Makes Music

Rolls-Royce engineers its luxury automobiles to be as quiet as can be. Sure, their V12 engines will come to life if you give ’em enough throttle. But that’s not what they’re designed for.

Enter the new Dawn “Inspired by Music” edition. Like the special Wraith of the same name, the drop-top features a range of unique enhancements to make it appeal more to wealthy aficionados of finer tunes – say, like record producers or opera patrons.

That means an even more aurally sensational Bespoke Audio system, along with copper or white paint and matching (or contrasting) copper trim. It’s being unveiled this weekend at the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este, which the BMW Group (of which Rolls-Royce is part) has sponsored for several years now. But for those of us not fortunate enough to be present at the most glamorous of auto shows on the shores of Lake Como in northern Italy, the automaker has released a tasteful handful of photos. And along with it, a rather unusual promo video.

Rolls-Royce wheeled the special-edition Dawn convertible into the anechoic sound-isolation chamber it typically uses to check for any unwanted extra noises in its six-figure automobiles. But this time, they fitted a hyper-sensitive microphone and recorded the few little sounds the Dawn does make: the click of the turning indicator, the soft thud of the closing doors, the barely audible sound of the umbrella popping out of the door, and the Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornament rising out from the hood. Then they mixed them with some classical instruments and created a little soundtrack. Not a bad way to make music, to our ears. And you can listen for yourself in the 45-second clip below.