The beautiful new Coupe is the third body style to be added to the Phantom range, joining the sedan and Drophead Coupe (convertible). Based closely on the 101EX concept first shown at Geneva two years ago, the Coupe is expected to expand the range’s appeal and bring in additional customers.

Smooth and expressively styled, the Coupe’s two-door body incorporates a number of changes, including the powerfully swept roofline and trunklid and the larger, front hinged doors. The Coupe is the most dynamically involving Rolls-Royce yet produced, with the stiffest ever Rolls-Royce chassis.

It shares much of its engineering with the Drophead Coupe, but with a number of subtle variations to give the car a different character. There’s more involving steering, and a sport button that will change the gearbox programming to deliver more aggressive shifting.

However, Rolls-Royce is keen to stress that none of this makes it a sports car: It’s a sporting car, not a sports car, they say, and it’s still very “waftable.”  In fact, thanks to changes that considerably increase luggage and fuel capacity, they see it as much more of a grand tourer than the Drophead Coupe.

There’s room for four bags of golf clubs, if that’s your priority, and fuel for up to 600 km (373 miles).

The biggest surprise is in the interior, where most of the features that appeared on the concept, or “experimental car,” as Rolls-Royce prefers to term it, have survived into the production version, including the extensive use of wood veneers, and the “starlight” headliner that displays pinpricks of light in the cabin roof lining.

Rolls-Royce Chairman and Chief Executive Ian Robertson also used his presentation to highlight the company’s upcoming RR4, a new, smaller (or should one say less enormous) family of cars, for which the company is developing a new range of engines that promise significant fuel and emissions improvements.

With over 1,000 cars sold in 2007, a three-model range on offer, a new family of cars in development, and a new assembly line recently installed in its UK-based Goodwood, factory, Rolls-Royce is busier and brighter than it’s been for many years.