I know there’s never going to be any definitive answer to the question of what American city has the best car culture, but if people want to argue, then I’m going to be on Team Los Angeles. I know there’s current Angelenos, like our own David Tracy, that aren’t sold on LA car culture, and still prefer Detroit, for example, but for me, during my roughly 20 years of living in that City of Angles or Angels, I have been completely convinced that it is a truly singular city for cars, and there are still to this day certain types of incredible car-related things that really can only happen in Los Angeles.
One of these things I saw by chance just yesterday, while driving through a sort of industrial part of the Valley with David. As soon as I spotted it, I made David turn the car around to take pictures, because this is such a fantastic example of an automotive category that Los Angeles provides, and one that exist almost nowhere else in the world:
The shitbox Rolls-Royce.
Yes, that’s right! The shitbox Roller! It’s an incredible thing that stands at the intersection of two Los Angeles car culture categories: street parked exotic or rare cars (which I’ve written about here before) and exotic or rare or expensive cars in genuinely miserable condition.
Sure, there’s other places where one could find Rolls-Royces and other exotics in bad condition, but usually those cars are in back lots of repair shops or junkyards or someone’s private collection. But Los Angeles I think is unique in that its surprisingly large and varied supply of beat-to-hell exotics are often still in active daily (or close enough) driver service and just parked on the street, like any old 1999 Honda Accord with a mismatched door or whatever.
This particular Rolls is a Silver Shadow II, which means it must be from somewhen between 1977 and 1980. The easiest way to spot a Silver Shadow II instead of an earlier Silver Shadow is the bumpers, which now have those beefy rubber strips and end caps. There’s also rack-and-pinion steering in the IIs, but that’s hard to see, or you could just look at the badge:
As you can tell by that partially-obscured UK number plate and the fact that the steering wheel is on the right:
…this was a UK car at some point in its life. Now it’s living it up in sunny LA, and spoken about in hushed, embarrassed tones by its hoity-toity relatives in Crewe, where they describe it as having “let itself go.”
The interior actually doesn’t look all that bad, though those seats have clearly endured their fair share of comfortable asses, and the varnish on the dashboard wood (real, of course) is starting to wrinkle like the cheese on an open-faced cheese sandwich placed in a toaster oven.
There also seems to be an 80s-vintage car phone there, peeking out between the seats!
The rear seat is a bit better, and the car is actually pretty tidy inside. It’s just worn. The headliner is free of tears, the carpet looks trodden but intact, and the door hardware seems mostly in place, even if the armrest is heading in a sort of melty Daliesque direction.
It’s still handsome after all this time, and the color scheme is interesting, even in its quietly distressed state: some sort of copper for the main body and an off-white roof. It’s unusual, and I like it. Of course, the paint on the hood is sun-cooked away in a few areas, and there’s a prodigious amount of what I think is bird poop after eating the berries of the Chinese privet plant (or some close relative that grows in Los Angeles), which makes that distinctive type of dark bird poop, and I know this because I asked an ornithologist about it once.
You know what is amazing about this car? No one has stolen the famous Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornament! Modern Rolls-Royces have special mechanisms to hide them inside the grille, and this one is just out there, proudly spreading her wings right on the side of the road.
The body is mostly straight save for a little dent at the back there, and a canted bumper, but overall everything is in place, it’s just that everything is worked. But I’d like to think that despite all the wear, this classy old lady is still going!
There’s something about these incredibly high-end cars that end up in a state like this. There’s a poignancy to them, because they kind of suggest a story, a story about the vicissitudes of success and the cruel blow of failures, and the strength of those last remnants of pride that might make someone hold on to one of the most obvious symbols of a charmed life, long after that life has gone.
Or, it could just be that someone picked one up cheap and is having a blast with it. Either way, there’s something I love about seeing this car, in this shape, parked on the street, and I hope LA will always have a place for shitbox Rolls-Royces by the many curbs of her often bumpy roads.
Top graphic image: Jason Torchinsky
Takes a certain kind.
The older and shittier it gets, the less it is able to distinguish itself from other shitboxes beyond being difficult and expensive to keep running.
They aren’t terribly difficult if you know them – these are purely mechanical cars and even the Citroen-licensed suspension isn’t rocket surgery (had the same in the back of a couple of Mercedes wagons). And really only expensive if you have to pay somebody else to do it. But at this point *everything* is expensive if you have to pay somebody.
A shitbox Rolls-Royce has rather more sense of occasion than a shitbox Honda. Or a new Honda, for that matter.
Look, has it been a few years (decades?) since they last had a big production in work? Yeah, but they’ve got irons in the fire! Any day now, that phone is gonna ring, and everything is gonna change! They’ll be BACK, baby! BACK and in a big way!
The most remarkable thing is the 2027 registration sticker, which means this thing has passed a smog test within the last two years!
Nothing $250 and knowing a guy, can’t fix.