Foreign News: Swank

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The Mercédès-Benz rear-engine car (see cut p. 33) is delivered in Manhattan for $2,175. Also on sale last week was the large Mercédès with supercharger and promised speed of 110 m.p.h., at $14,000. No French, Italian, Czechoslovak or Japanese car was offered last week, though European Motors Inc. specializes in importing on order and servicing anything, however exotic.* A new firm of interest to swanksters was J. S. Inskip, Inc., successors to defunct Rolls-Royce of America Inc. in importing the English article. On their floor was one of the extremely few Phantom III models yet manufactured by Rolls-Royce Ltd., one of the first of these 12-cylinder cars having gone to H.R.H. the Duke of Kent. This car (see cut) is priced in Manhattan at $17,000.

In London today Rolls-Royce Ltd. is considered an armament firm, chiefly engaged in turning out aircraft engines. In 30 years of Rolls-Royce production there have been only four models: the Silver Ghost (1906-25), the Phantom I (1925-29), the Phantom II (1929-35) and the Phantom III. Says the company in bringing out a 12-cylinder car for the first time: "Rolls-Royce have probably had more experience in the design and construction of 12-cylinder engines than any other firm in the world, for their first motor of this type was produced over 20 years ago.''†

In the United Kingdom popular newspapers hire downy-lipped young peers to "review" new motor cars and the London Sunday Pictorial surpassed itself when it got the 6th Earl of Cottenham to write about the Phantom III. No fool, the Earl has worked in the aviation department of Vickers Ltd., the leading British armorers, but his description of the time he first drove a Phantom III has become a little classic of Mayfairese. Its title: The Well Behaved Great-Grandson of a Ghost.

"This particular car did not come into my hands as those of a motoring correspondent," wrote the Earl of Cottenham. "Indeed, in the strict sense of the term. I am not a professional motoring correspondent at all. . . .

"What other cars might claim to be in the same category as the Phantom III? Only five that I can recall offhand: the latest Hispano-Suiza, Horch, Mercédès-Benz, Packard, and the huge 'golden' type Bugatti."

Having taken the wheel of a Phantom III, in which he was shortly to do 93 m.p.h., Lord Cottenham continued, "I shrugged myself more comfortably into position behind the wheel and cast about little searching glances under the scuttle, as one does when familiarizing oneself with the instrument layout and control locations of a new model. . . . I saw the red telltale bulb glow on the ignition switchboard. . . . The big engine had hesitated— 'hunted' we call it—for a second or two, whether because my cuff had caught the throttle lever and sharply shut it or whether, as Colonel Harker afterwards said, because of a fleeting, almost intangible carburation mood ... I do not know. At any rate there was no tremor, no noise; nothing but the sudden sight of the red bulb, a mute witness. But the engine had not stopped at all. and did not stop."