Someone Drove a 2019 Rolls-Royce 480,000 Miles And I’m Both Impressed And Not Impressed And Confused

High-mileage cars are always interesting, because just the presence of all those miles traveled suggests some sort of story. Maybe it’s just a story of a long, boring, interminable daily commute, maybe it’s a story of adventures all over the world to forgotten corners, meeting fascinating people and doing incredible things, or even some strange mixture of the two. Whatever it is, a car with a huge number of miles on it has lived, and I will always respect that.

That said, why am I having such conflicting feelings about this 2019 Rolls-Royce that has been driven over 480,000 miles? Objectively, that is an incredibly impressive number of miles; it’s far enough to drive to the moon and back. It’s enough miles to drive around the entire equator of the Earth 19 times. It’s far enough that, if the owner were an astronaut working on the International Space Station, they could have commuted to and from the station every day for two and a half years, provided physics worked quite differently.

What I’m trying to figure out is why my initial reaction to this story was what it was, which was, well, kind of a cynical reaction. A $450,000 when-new Rolls-Royce had better damn well be able to cover 450,000 miles, right? A buck a mile feels like a decent expectation for a car like this.

Here, if you know German, you can not only watch, but watch and understand this video about this high-mileage Rolls and its owner:

The owner is a man from Liechtenstein named Josef Weikinger, who seems to be the owner of a high-performance solar glass company called Interfloat. Weikinger, clearly a successful fellow, seems to have a passion or perhaps fetish for driving cars very long distances. Back in 2014, this same guy drove his Maybach 62 over a million kilometers, making it almost definitely the highest-mileage Maybach 62 on the planet. A planet that, it’s worth noting, that Maybach could have circled about 25 times.

I suppose with that in mind it shouldn’t be shocking that Weikinger looks to have repeated this feat, only now he’s set what must be the mileage record for another ultra-luxury car, his 2019 (some sources say 2018?) Rolls-Royce Phantom. He’s driven that thing all over the place, and in the video, he notes that, with winter tires, the Phantom is quite a tank, and he’s taken it across Siberia, through parts of Africa, Scandinavia, and more.

In the video, he also notes that this passion for driving long distances started when he had a stent put into his heart and was told to avoid flying for medical reasons. Even if those reasons are no longer such a concern, he seems to have stuck with that suggestion and really, really embraced driving.

So far, all of this is great, and I think you could argue that he’s one of the very few people to really be getting his money’s worth out of cars in this rarefied class. It’s also mentioned that he takes the Phantom in for service every two months like clockwork, which helps keep the car in immaculate condition. The only major repair he’s noted was replacing the soft-close hardware on the driver’s door, which makes sense considering how much use that thing has seen.

All of this, though, speaks to my ambivalence about this achievement. I mean, if you have one of the best-built cars in the entire world and you’re taking it to be serviced every two months, then of course you can get almost a million kilometers on the thing! And, yeah, sure, that’s an impressive amount of driving to do, but it’s not like he’s driving all those miles in a Velorex or something: this is arguably one of the most comfortable cars on the planet.

So with all of that in mind, I have to admit that my first reaction upon learning about this was somewhat … tepid. If I were rich as hell and had a wildly expensive car that was serviced with near-menstrual cycle levels of regularity, then I’m pretty sure I could put a million kilometers on a Rolls, too. This is a far cry from some non-1%er putting almost 500,000 miles on a Nissan Sentra that they fix in their driveway, or even that guy who drove his Volvo P1800 3.2 million miles. There’s a difference in, say, the story of that Volvo, which is a tale of dedication and perseverance and a somewhat unhinged degree of focus, and this Rolls-Royce. which, while not devoid of those good qualities, is much more a study in how having massive resources can get you almost anything you want.

I got some blowback from others in our vibrant Algonquin Roundtable-like Slack channel, suggesting that perhaps I’m a big jerk for minimizing the admittedly impressive achievement, but it’s hard not to be at least a little cynical here. This feels similar to my hostility to cars like the Bugatti Veyron, where it feels like of course they were able to build the fastest production car in the world! Bugatti had a blank check and some of the best engineers in the world. It’s not shocking!

Maybe I’m wrong here? I just can’t shake the feeling, though.

Also interesting is thinking about how much of a depreciation hit this Phantom will be taking with its considerable mileage history. It may also be a record-setting car when it comes to depreciation. You really can’t find any similar cars when it comes to mileage, because there are no other Phantoms with 400,000+ miles! Most Phantoms seem to have, at the high end, covered about 25,000 to 35,000 miles.

And even 25,000-mile-plus cars are uncommon! Most seem to have about 10,000 miles on them or less. Look at the hit that going from 10,000 miles to 30,000 miles: that price dropped by almost $40,000, even though the higher-mileage car is two years newer. So what is a 500,000-mile Phantom going to go for? Kelly Blue Book wouldn’t give me a price on that, so all I can do is guess. Maybe $200,000? If the status is important, maybe that would push the price up higher? And it is impeccably maintained, of course.

This whole deal confuses me. I’m honestly not sure how to feel about this. It’s significant that someone is driving a Rolls-Royce Phantom this many miles, because of what the car is and how unusual this is compared to how it’s usually driven. But am I surprised that one of the most expensive cars in the world, subjected to near-constant maintenance, is able to drive this far? No. Hell no. It damn well better do that.

What do you think? That’s what matters here. Let’s hash it out in the comments, like civilized folk!

Top graphic images: Screenshot, Hamid Tailormade Cars/YouTube