Talk:Rolls-Royce Limited

Car images?

Does anyone else find the car images overpowering?! It is difficult to tell that they made aircraft engines as well. Needs a trim down I think. Nimbus (Cumulus nimbus floats by) 19:30, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

It's got even sillier lately, new images have added a raft of whitespace. Is there not a Rolls-Royce car article? This article is about the company (that also made a lot of aero engines). Appears to be out of control. Nimbus (Cumulus nimbus floats by) 22:18, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Luxury?

"When World War I broke out in August 1914 Rolls-Royce (and many others) were taken by surprise. As a manufacturer of luxury cars, the company was immediately vulnerable"

This is the first mention that the cars were considered luxury cars. The first section should mention the fact that the cars were considered luxury cars, and contrast them to other cars of the period. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.107.91.105 (talk) 20:38, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Rolls-Royce cars were never set out to be exclusively luxury cars, although that is how they ended up being percieved. The guiding principle was always quality, in that their cars never allowed cheapness to be a criteria in their design or construction. Put simply, a part or component was chosen/designed so as to be the best (and in the engineering sense, most elegant) possible solution to the problem, and as a result this made the cars much more expensive than many of their contemporaries. This 'quality' guiding principle later transferred to the aero engine side of the company, something that becomes much more important when you have lives dependant on the reliability and usability of an engine.

BTW, Rolls-Royce didn't actually make anything other than the engine/chassis and running gear, and other mechanical components - the bodies and upholstery were made by a company of the customer's choosing, usually a specialised coachwork company like Mulliner's. So the 'luxury' of the visible portions of the car were largely a result of the customer's own choices. For example, a customer buying a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost could theoretically if/he so wished, have had this put on the RR-supplied chassis instead; Rolls-Royce Armoured Car. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.4.57.101 (talk) 11:47, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

Merger Proposal

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

The result was merge into Rolls-Royce Limited. -- Mrmatiko (talk) 09:48, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

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I propose that the article Rolls-Royce of America be merged into Rolls-Royce Limited because Rolls-Royce of America doesn't seem to be significantly separate from Rolls-Royce Limited to be worthy of its own article. It would also be fairly trivial to incorporate the information contained in the Rolls-Royce of America article into this article as a new section. Mrmatiko (talk) 13:09, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Check the Phantom IV talk page

Come on. --RThompson82 (talk) 07:01, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Military vehicles

I have been alerted to more stuff that I think should be in this article by finding this 1964 item (while looking for something else)
Rolls-Royce Engine In New B.M.C. 112 mph Saloon. The Times, Wednesday, Aug 19, 1964; pg. 5; Issue 56094 from which I quote:
"MULTI-FUEL ENGINE
. . . On the engine side of the factory production of the "K" range of multi-fuel opposed piston engines is also being expanded. These extremely powerful compact six-cylinder units, which will run on four different kinds of fuel, from 80 octane petrol to paraffin, were introduced 14 months ago as a future replacement for the "B" range of Rolls-Royce engines, which at present power all the wheeled vehicles of the British Army and are in use by 21 governments.
The outstanding advantages of the Rolls-Royce "K" engine are its small number of moving parts and longer working life. It has no valves, springs, rockers, tappets, push-rods, camshaft or cylinder head so servicing can be cut to a minimum."

Elsewhere I have found the statement that more than 30,000 of those "B" type engines have been made so they are noteworthy for Rolls-Royce

I don't know anything of the subject so I can only draw it to some generous person's attention for addition to the article. Eddaido (talk) 21:16, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

RR engines were also used in the Austin Champ and several others such as the Alvis Saladin, FV432, and similar. Then there's the Rolls-Royce Meteor which was a tank engine. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.7.147.13 (talk) 15:58, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

Bankruptcy due to RB211 or not?

The RB211 page says that the engine was not the cause of bankruptcy but a currency fluctuation was, however this page says that the engine was at fault? Which is true!? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.88.253.64 (talk) 16:17, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

The cause of Rolls going into receivership was the company agreeing to develop the RB211 on a fixed-price contract basis with Lockheed for the engine, an engine which subsequently cost far more to develop than the management had anticipated. So, being unable to pass the increased cost on to the customer, the company would have then been forced to sell each engine to Lockheed at a loss. In addition the management cancelled development of the RB203 and RB207 (the latter intended for the Airbus A300 which the-then British government had been backing but which then withdrew Britain from the consortium), data from-which would have helped with solving some of the RB211's initial problems normal in the development of any new engine. By 1970 RR had run up considerable debts with no foreseeable way to pay for them.

Other factors also came into play - the fall in the Pound at around this time would also have affected RR's viability - but the real cause was RR's management making an unwise fixed-price deal with Lockheed, and in them then vastly underestimating development costs of the engine. The RR management then compounded the problem by making poor subsequent decisions.

Lockheed were also in financial difficulty at the same time, as the US government had recently reduced an order for Lockheed C-5 Galaxys which also put them (Lockheed) under considerable financial pressure, so they would have been unable to afford to pay any increase in the unit cost of the RB211 anyway. So the fixed-price contract with Rolls for the engine couldn't be re-negotiated, which in other circumstances might have been possible. At the time, there were no other firm applications for the RB211 other than the L-1011 TriStar and so Lockheed was RR's only customer for the engine.

After nationalisation in 1971 Stanley Hooker - who had been with RR initially, and later Bristol Siddeley, and who had by then retired - was brought in to head engine development and he helped bring the RB211 into service. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.24.215.150 (talk) 10:10, 11 August 2014 (UTC)