Rolls-Royce enjoys one of the loftiest and grandest reputations in the entire automotive world, and while it’s well-earned, it’s not really unassailable. While they like to remind us that they “inspire greatness” it’s fun to remember that, at times, they’ve inspired some half-assery, too. This 1975 Rolls-Royce Camargue brochure has a nice reminder of that, with this picture of a dashboard that, while certainly cool in a number of ways, hardly feels luxurious or the best of anything in the world. The ergonomics look like they were designed by a brain in a jar of brain-stay-alive-juice and who was told about how humans work over the phone. This is the dash of a wildly expensive and exclusive luxury car? It looks like some VW kit car dashes that friends of my friends’ dads were building in their backyards.
I mean, it’s not just me, right? Those gauges look like they may have come off a Cessna or something, and I respect the exposed screwheads and all that, but on one of the most expensive luxury cars in the world at that time? It looks like gauges and switches just picked out of a catalog, screwed into a big vertical slab of wood. Hell, a Pinto in this era at least had a custom-molded dash with better integrated instruments and controls.
I mean, they had Pininfarina design this thing! Why’d they phone in the dash?
Sure, a lot of people thought the Camargue was ugly, but I think it’s pretty handsome and dapper from the outside. Oh, and get this – this car had, it’s claimed, the first dual-zone climate controls, which is impressive. But why did they do it like this:
See what’s going on there? Upper and lower zones. Not driver/passenger or front/rear, but upper and lower, for all of you who have always wanted to freeze your feet and cook your face, or vice-versa. Who wanted it set up this way? I’ve read this dual climate system took Rolls-Royce eight years to develop. What? Why? No one spoke up during all this time and said, hey, do people really want different climates for their upper and lower halves?
I don’t get it. Hey, who wants to look at the idiot lights?
Again, kinda crappy for such a fancy car. All jammed together, like rows of candy-colored teeth, no real organization, and rounded corners on the outer lights that don’t correspond to the bezel shape? Great work fellas. Excellence my ass. Plus, I like the use of the superfluous word “failure” on some of these. STOPLAMP FAILURE, PARTIAL BRAKE FAILURE, like a red warning light flashing for these might somehow be confused with, what, a SUCCESS warning? Does this mean the MASTER CYLINDER light just illuminates if a master cylinder is found to be present and accounted for?
Also, green for LOW FUEL? We have the usual red=bad, yellow=warning color coding expected, a conceit that means, the world over, that green=go, all good. So is that lamp saying, hey, we’re almost out of fuel! Let’s do this thing! Woooooo!
Get off your high horse, Rolls-Royce.
It looks like a 70s pickup truck interior with a genuine imitation fake wood dash kit. Is that a Craig radio from Montgomery-Ward I see?
I’m damned if I can remember which it was, but one of the cars I owned told you right there in the owner’s manual why it has dual-zone upper/lower AC. According to the book, it was for chilly-yet-sunny mornings, so you could simultaneously warm yer tootsies and cool yer face as you drove eastward into the rising sun.
Did they rob the steering wheel off a Ford Fairmont?
I’m getting some serious early-90s Chevy Suburban vibes from the burlwood trim on the dashboard. (I’m assuming Rolls-Royce used actual wood though.)
I agree that it looks disjointed by today’s standards, but I don’t think dashboard design in general at that time was very good for any manufacturer with as many features. And if you look at the interior as a whole, it’s still slathered in leather and wool carpeting, which I think is how it maintained its luxury superiority.
I’ve seen a more coherent dash design in Soviet tractors from the 70s. Better built ones too. Who knew Rolls Royce should have been taking dash design lessons from the Zetor 5245.
I know because used to own one.
I know why they did the upper and lower dash controls!
They did it for two reasons:
1. The blower motors and defogging vents they installed had the same ability to move air as a mouse with asthma breathing through a straw.
2 The cars were so poorly sealed from air coming in through gaps in the doors and window seals that even on recirculate you could never get rid of the humid air.
So, in rainy and cold England, it’s frequently necessary to have cold air blowing on the windshield to stop it from fogging up but also to ensure that you don’t turn into a human icicle just to see out the windshield.
I spent many a rainy cold day freezing to death in our 80s Range Rover as a kid because the second the heat was set to anything resembling warm the windshield fogged up. This also happened in my grandmother’s 70s Jag and still happens in my black cab the moment it starts to rain.
I find this confusing, because I always use HOT air to defog windshields, and it seems consistent with the laws of physics: when you have excessive condensation, you want to heat things up to promote evaporation.
Now, I can imagine if you have water in the cabin (from people’s wet clothes, and from damp drafts blowing in from outside), and the cabin is warmer than outside (quite likely given typical British weather) then that water will evaporate and then condense on the windshield, which is cold due to contact with the outside air. But surely blowing cold air on the windshield could only make the problem worse. What you need is hot air blowing on the windshield. If the vents designed specifically for this purpose are too weak to do anything, then maybe setting the upper climate zone to hot and the lower one to cold would help. That way your garments stay cold and wet but the windshield gets warm and dry. Maybe?
Speaking as a very happy Jaguar owner I love British cars and someday I still hope to own a Bentley (and maybe a Daimler), but I just can’t generate any enthusiasm or desire to own a Rolls. Something about them is always outside my personal tastes. This is an example of what is truly malaise era – it’s supposed to be one of the great cars of the world but in reality it’s nowhere close and an American land barge will do the job just as well or better.
I think it’s great. It looks like a plane cockpit, for which you need a pilot. A dude buying a Rolls is going to have a chauffeur, like a pilot for your car. This getup cements that fact, that this is a vehicle meant to be piloted by a professional, not driven by just anybody.
The Camargue was a personal luxury coupe/grand tourer, the expectation was the owner would drive himself
Well that’s where they went wrong! Catering to the common person who still drives themselves around like a chump.