The ‘priceless’ Rolls-Royce SUV you need an invite to buy

This Private Collection model will take you to the moon and back, if you can only get your hands on one.

Rolls-Royce Black Badge Cullinan Blue Shadow.

Stephen Corby

3 min read

4:00PMNovember 06, 2023.

Updated 7:03AMNovember 07, 2023

Anyone who’s been lucky enough to ascend to the driver’s seat of a Rolls-Royce Cullinan, the famed brand’s vast and lovely SUV, will tell you it’s a lofty position from which to look down upon the world, but for some customers it’s simply not high enough. They’d prefer to feel as if they are sitting 62 miles above the Earth, looking down on creation and out among the stars – which is exactly what the very limited-edition Blue Shadow version is designed to deliver.

Part of the brand’s Private Collection, the Blue Shadow Cullinan is based on the idea of the Kármán Line, an imaginary boundary 62 miles (or roughly 100km) above us at which the Earth’s atmosphere bleeds into outer space.

If you were to sit at that point, in your Cullinan, the horizon would turn black and you would officially be an astronaut (according to the international record-keeping body, FAI, activities undertaken below the Kármán Line are “aeronautics” and above it they are “astronautics”).

Six layers of lush paint are used on the Black Badge Cullinan Blue Shadow’s facia to create a 3D sensation of straddling the Kármán Line inside the car, while the roof features an incredible embroidered moon, complete with craters, and created with no less than 250,000 stitches. Lighting up that moon just above your head are 1183 white and blue fibre optic lights that become stars in the headliner (and yes, you get shooting stars, too).

Beneath the stars and moon is, of course, the humble planet where the rest of us live – represented here by leather seats featuring 75,000 carefully crafted perforations, designed to replicate “the Earth from space”, or clouds floating above land and oceans. This incredible feat of intricacy was attempted five times before Rolls designers were happy with it.

One of the Rolls-Royce bespoke designers behind the Blue Shadow project, Celina Mettang, explains that her team’s job, when developing a special edition like this, is to find daring and exceptional ideas that will fascinate customers.

“In the case of the Cullinan, it’s our sports utility, it’s all about that elevated perspective, sitting higher, so we thought, where could our customers take their Cullinan to enjoy that perspective? And one region that we hardly explore is space,” she says, while just slightly stating the obvious (so far only Elon Musk has launched a car into space, so it’s not often explored by drivers).

“The Kármán line was the perfect story, with the elevated perspective it provides of looking down on Earth and also looking up into the universe.”

The level of exclusivity of a Private Collection vehicle like this means that you can’t just decide you want one, you have to be invited to buy it, and only 62 will ever be made (yes, 62, because that’s the number of miles to the Kármán Line, and because 100 – as in kilometres – would have been “far too many”).

“A vehicle like Blue Shadow is offered to collectors who have multiple [Rolls-Royces] and can appreciate special cars like this,” Mettang explained.

“This car was offered to people through our private office, and by the time the concept was shared with the world all 62 of them were allocated to clients. We had many customers who were intrigued when they heard about it, but there will be no more – Private Collection cars are designed to be rare.

“This is something designed for extraordinary people who push boundaries, redefine possibilities; people who go further, explore the unknown and discover what lies beyond the horizon.”

So if you haven’t got one yourself already, the best you might one day hope for is to see a Black Badge Cullinan Blue Shadow from the outside, and fortunately that’s pretty special as well because it was painted with a new and unique form of Stardust Blue paint.

“Usually we use one layer of crystals in our paint, to give them that sparkle in the sun, but here for the first time we’ve used two kinds of differently coloured crystals – a champagne and a blue – which creates a beautiful sense of motion within the paint when it’s exposed to light; it becomes really alive,” Mettang enthuses.

While you might expect such an out-of-this-world vehicle to come with rocket boosters or jet thrusters, the Cullinan makes do with the usual yet impressive 6.75-litre V12 engine, making 440kW and 900Nm.

And how much would such a rare moon shot of a vehicle set you back?

Well, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that Rolls-Royce isn’t telling (“the price is commensurate with the work that went into it”).

A normal, non-lunar-surfaced Black Badge Cullinan costs $791,900 in Australia, but it would be fair to guess that the Blue Shadow version, with its inherent collectability, could easily be double that. Still, you do get a set of matching luggage thrown in.