Bespoke auto | When customer is king, customisation reigns

While there’s no dearth of drivers indulging in the purchase of luxury vehicles, there is s small, swish set that choose to not buy a car ‘off the rack’. Instead, they opt for a bespoke car, splurging on personalising every single aspect of their drive experience - from the bespoke headliner of a Rolls-Royce Phantom to the blended colour of a Porsche, the stitches on a Lamborghini steering wheel and your monogram on the headrest of a Maserati, the options are endless. Here’s a look at the bespoke services offered by some of our favourite automotive purveyors.

ROLLS-ROYCE BESPOKE

There are a staggering 44,000 exterior colours to choose from when you are commissioning your very own Rolls-Royce through its Bespoke service. For those who choose to leave their personalised stamp on their motorcar, colour options can be ‘created’ to suit the most outlandish of requests—the colour of your dog’s fur, matching the colour of your daughter’s eyes. Or maybe the owner’s initials hand stitched onto the headrest. One of our favourite bespoke talking points: The signature Starlight Headliner, incorporating embroidery, sculpture and marquetry, as well as thousands of hand-placed stitches. All this bespoke magic takes place in Goodwood, United Kingdom, at Home of Rolls-Royce where handcrafted details are painstakingly etched onto each bespoke car. In addition to the Bespoke service, there is also Rolls-Royce Private Office, which is in charge of the ultra-specialised bespoke commissions. There are five Private Offices around the world—UK, Dubai, Shanghai, New York and Seoul. Each of these offices have a dedicated design team that handholds the customer through the entire process. Indian customers can, in principle, visit the regional Private Office in Seoul, or even Dubai.

RANGE ROVER SV BESPOKE

For those Range Rover fans who’d like to take their off-roader one notch higher, there’s always the option of the manufacturer’s SV Bespoke programme. Short for ‘special vehicles’ unit, the SV Bespoke programme lets you choose and personalise myriad details down to the colour palette of the exteriors, the texture of the interior trims as well as the different materials used as trims, seat covers and surfaces. An SV model cannot be ordered at a store, as you would expect and we’re talking about a whopping 1.6 million customisation options. Once the details are finalised, the car is made in the SV unit in the UK and shipped to India. We recently drove a bespoke Range Rover SV and some of the unapologetic indulgences include a built-in tray table, fridge, first-class recliner seat and special leather on the seats and trims. British luxury at its best!

LAMBORGHINI AD PERSONAM

As if buying a Lamborghini wasn’t indulgence enough, you can take it one notch higher with the Italian carmaker’s Ad Personam bespoke offering. Think a seat logo done entirely by hand stitching, the owner’s monogram dotting the cabin, special carpets, leather options and even stitching colours. Fun fact: Ad Personam holds the record in the automotive industry for its 348 Ad Personam colours, created specially for Lamborghini. A talking point is the diamond coating that customers can opt for —a new paint, which contains micro crystals like diamond dust, resulting in a beautiful glimmer on the car. In fact, the Ad Personam team can even create a work of art inside your Lamborghini using hand embroidery—your favourite painting, a self-portrait or a portrait of your pet—inside the cabin. The Italian carmaker takes colour very seriously and has divided its bespoke colour offering into five families ranging from sporty and contemporary to eclectic, classic and technical, each family with its own range of Ad Personam colours. At every step of the Lamborghini personalisation experience, Italian heritage, culture and craftsmanship is constantly alluded to. Italian savoir faire at its very best!

PORSCHE EXCLUSIVE MANUFAKTUR

Driving a Porsche is one thing, but driving one that has been entirely customised for you is elevated luxury. Thanks to the German sportscar manufacturer’s made-to-order service, Porsche Exclusive Manufaktur, you can get, say, a 911 or a Panamera of your dreams. A visit to Porsche Exclusive Manufaktur’s design studios in Stuttgart, Germany, makes it impossible to ignore the attention to detail to make this sports car as personalised as possible—transforming any Porsche into ‘Your’ Porsche. Starting with multiple options for trims, leather, stitching, carbon accents and nuanced detailing on the exteriors, a Porsche driver can enjoy over 700 personalisation possibilities of bespoke components inside and outside. Porsche’s Paint to Sample lets you slap on any of the 220 colour options, some historic Porsche signature colours across all models. All this powered by the digital Porsche Car Configurator, to visualise and create every detail. To go the extra mile—and splurge a bit more—you can opt for Porsche’s most exclusive customisation service, Sonderwunsch (special request, in German), where you work with the specialised Sonderwunch team based at the production unit in Zuffenhausen. If you have three years to spare, you can even commission a one-off Porsche!

BMW INDIVIDUAL

For the scores of BMW fans out there, this is a great way to drive the iconic Bavarian car, with a stamp of absolute bespoke luxury. BMW Individual, which the German carmaker first began to offer in 1992 with the E46 3 Series, is now a luxe offering reserved for 25 select models, imported from Germany, USA and Mexico. BMW incorporates a strong art angle in its Individual offering—hand-painted parts are a case in point, eschewing robotic painting, and carried out by skilled paint specialists. Be that as it may, a BMW Individual customer can enjoy 155 matte and gloss colours. The process of ‘painting’ an Individual car is a study in itself. Given the complexity and specialisation of each bespoke share, the car can often undergo up to three separate paint jobs, in order to achieve the depth and finish required. BMW Individual sources its parts and supplies from some of the best suppliers in Spain, USA and Czech Republic, painstakingly transported to the assembly lines, resulting in a perfectly personalised BMW Individual experience.

MASERATI FUORISERIE

The iconic Italian carmaker alludes to haute couture when talking about its bespoke programme. Aptly named Fuoriserie (Italian for outside the series), customers can practically create a one-off Maserati for themselves. Available currently for the MC20, GranTurismo, GranCabrio, Grecale and other models, the Fuoriserie offering lets you customise handcrafted details in the cabin, stitching, inlays, monograms, badging as well as more technical aspects like brake calipers, paint colours and even materials used inside the cabin. The home of Maserati’s Fuoriserie service is the Officine Fuoriserie Maserati at its historic headquarters in Modena, Italy. In this atelier, Italian craftsmanship takes centrestage as multiple workstations quietly orchestrate different aspects of personalisation. A customer gets access to a Fuoriserie lounge at the Officine in Modena, where they sit with a bespoke specialist to co-create a ‘coach built’ car, while poring over physical samples of fabrics, leather, stitches, photographs and videos, along with a digital configurator. Once the client decides on the final blueprint, the car goes into special production, followed by a personalised handover, if you choose to travel to Modena for the ceremony.