This Rolls-Royce/Ford LTD Mockup Is Incredible And Doesn’t Seem To Be On The Internet: Cold Start

I guess I myself am making that headline inaccurate, because you and I are here on this internet right now, the home of websites like this and Wallace Shawn’s Instagram page. So that means this car, built in 1970 at the behest of Anthony Paolino of Providence, Rhode Island, is now on the internet, in some small capacity. And that’s a good thing, because this gleefully unholy mashup of a 1969 Ford LTD two-door coupé and a lot of Rolls-Royce parts is just too amazing to keep hidden in the pages of a physical publication.

That publication was volume 8, number 4 of Automobile Quarterly, which I bought a copy of at a used bookstore. I also bought my kid some Nintendo 3DS games there, and a few weeks ago I found an Atari 810 disk drive for $20 there, too.

But that’s not important now. This is:

Let’s look at that top image of it again, too:

What are we looking at, here? That’s a 1969 Ford LTD coupé that has been extensively modified with Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow parts and a lot of careful and creative bodywork from some Providence-area bodyshop. I think they did a fantastic job; for comparison, here’s a 1969 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow:

…and, so you know what an LTD looked like prior to Rolls-Roycification, here’s a commercial from the time:

That front end is very different–covered headlamps, quite different detailing, very different proportions, everything is different, which is why the Rolls-Royce costume is so impressive.

In the brief article about the car, Paolino mentions his dissatisfaction with the Silver Shadow, and he would know, as he owns a ’67. He felt the Rolls was too tall and narrow, and far, far too needlessly complex for what it was, with systems upon systems for every feature of the car – forty systems too many, according to Paolino’s estimate – and what was the benefit? It was just harder to fix, and parts took too long to get.

So, he had his LTD transformed into an approximation of the Rolls-Royce, only this Rolls was lower, wider, and a fraction of the cost of the real one, even after all the cosmetic surgery. Paolino mentioned that at highway speeds, the genuine Rolls was quieter, but at city driving speeds, he really couldn’t tell the difference.

I think Paolino’s experiment is kind of brilliant, and lays bare the myth of ultra-luxury cars, namely that they’re not really all that much better than more mainstream cars, or at least they weren’t in the late 1960s/early 1970s. You’re still paying a lot for that flying lady hood ornament and all the considerable status she drags along with her.

Ford seems to have taken this idea to heart in the later 1970s and early 1980s, as you can see in ads like this one:

I mean, I’m sure the Rolls is better, but is it $220,000 better? Because that’s the price difference (adjusted for inflation). I think mechanically, physically, practically, the answer is no, but in the stranger, more unquantifiable realm of status, the Rolls probably still has a considerable edge.

Mostly, I just would like to see more people taking low-to-mid-range cars and getting body shops to make them look vastly more expensive. Because it’s fun, dammit.