The story
The Corniche grew out of the Silver Shadow, the first Rolls-Royce with a monocoque body, by way of the 2-door coupe and drophead that Mulliner Park Ward built from the late 1960s. In March 1971 the coupe and convertible gained a deeper radiator, about 10 percent more power, extra wood inside and a name taken from the cliff roads above Monaco. Each car took around 4 months to build, 2 weeks of it on the top alone. Asked about power, the factory would only say it was adequate, and the car never hurried: about 120 mph and a self-leveling ride that made bad pavement irrelevant.
It was launched in a crisis. Rolls-Royce went bankrupt in 1971 over the cost of its RB211 jet engine, and the car business was split off and floated on its own in 1973, yet the standard of the cars did not slip. Over 2 decades the Corniche gained rack-and-pinion steering, fuel injection, ABS and airbags, and after the coupe was dropped in 1981 the convertible carried the name alone. About 5,160 convertibles were built. Its one visible flaw is the folded top, heaped behind the rear seats. Owners tend to forgive it within seconds.
