Rolls-Royce once created three or four 9.0-liter V16 engines, but only one was ever used
Published on Jul 11, 2024 at 3:03 PM (UTC+4)
by Alessandro Renesis
Last updated on Oct 06, 2025 at 8:32 PM (UTC+4)
Edited by
Tom Wood
Rolls-Royce once created a unique 9.0-liter version of the Phantom.
It was created for a movie, but Rolls-Royce liked it so much, it ended up making a few more just for fun.
Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your point of view, they never made a production version.
It’s a real shame that more of these didn’t hit the streets.
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Rolls-Royce had built the engine as an experiment, but the origins of the actual car are not 100 percent clear.
Some say Rolls-Royce created this for a bit of fun for a car show.
But based on something Rowan Atkinson, the ‘Mr Bean’ actor, once said, the story might be a bit different.
A 9.0-liter Rolls-Royce for a movie
On several occasions, British actor Rowan Atkinson said that he personally asked Rolls-Royce to create a unique 9.0-liter Phantom for a movie.
Atkinson played Johnny English in the eponymous movie franchise comprising three movies.
Johnny English, in the words of Atkinson himself, is ‘a spy who is not quite as good as he thinks he is’, and Atkinson wanted to give the character something unique.
That’s why this car, the 9.0-liter Rolls-Royce, featured in the second of three movies, the 2011 sequel, titled Johnny English Reborn.
A truly massive engine
The 9.0-liter V16 luxury car created for these prototypes is one of the largest engines ever fitted to a car.
It has the same number of cylinders, and the same layout, as Bugatti’s newest engine, but it is larger.
At 9 liters, this is larger than the 8.4-liter V10 that powered the last Viper, which was the largest engine ever fitted to a car in terms of displacement.
And it is also bigger than the new 8.3-liter V16 Bugatti Tourbillon, which took that particular title from the Viper, which is no longer in production.
Obviously, this is kind of a moot point, though.
Because there’s no such thing as a production 9.0-liter Rolls-Royce, and there will probably never be one.
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