This is a 6.75 liter V12 out of a 2009 Rolls-Royce Phantom VII. For reasons unknown it now finds itself out of its original car, resting on a shipping pallet, and being offered for sale on eBay Motors with a Buy it Now price of $18,049.74 USD.
The Phantom VII was released in 2003 and interestingly, it was the first new Rolls-Royce to be released under the ownership of BMW. The model is now widely credited with being that car that restored Rolls-Royce’s reputation as a manufacturer of high-end luxury cars, and it remains a relatively common sight on the streets of the world’s wealthiest cities.
This is the Rolls-Royce Phantom VII, it was the first Rolls-Royce developed and released under BMW ownership, and many credit it with restoring the brand’s image as the maker of the world’s best luxury cars. Image courtesy of Rolls-Royce Limited.
The exterior design of the Phantom VII was penned by Marek Djordjevic and the interior was styled by Charles Coldham. The engineering that went into the car was highly sophisticated, with an aluminium spaceframe that was produced in Norway, machined and shaped in Denmark, then finally welded together by hand in Germany before being shipped to the Rolls-Royce factory in Goodwood, in southern England, for completion.
The body is also largely aluminum, a decision made to help keep the curb weight as low as possible. Despite the extensive use of aluminum in the unibody chassis and body the car still tipped the scales at 2,560 kgs or 5,644 lbs. This weight was largely down to two factors, the highly detailed luxury fitout, and the sheer physical size of the car – it’s almost 6 meters long and two meters wide.
The Rolls-Royce Phantom VII was powered not by a V8, as its predecessors had been for decades, but by a modified version of the advanced BMW N73 V12 engine. The Rolls-Royce version of this engine was named the N73B68, it had an increased displacement of 6,749cc up from 5,972cc, and it produced 453 bhp at 5,350 rpm with a healthy 531 lb ft of torque at 3,500 rpm.
The N73 engine family all featured double overhead cams per bank, four valves per cylinder, double-VANOS (BMW’s variable valve timing), and Valvetronic (BMW’s variable valve lift system). The BMW/Rolls-Royce N73B68 V12 was produced from 2003 to 2016 when it was succeeded by the new BMW N74, a twin-turbocharged V12 that offered more power as well as improved fuel economy and emissions.
The engine you see here is one of these BMW/Rolls-Royce N73B68 units, exactly how it ended up for sale separately is anyone’s guess – though the most likely answer is that the car it was originally fitted to was crashed or otherwise damaged beyond economically viable repair.
This BMW/Rolls-Royce N73B68 V12 is listed as coming complete with all attachments, ready to bolt in as a replacement engine or act as a source of spare parts.
The likelihood is that this engine will be bought by a specialist garage as a spare unit, or to be disassembled and used as a source of individual spare parts. There is a small chance that it’ll be bought by an absolute madman who wants to install it into his 1984 Pontiac Fiero, and to be perfectly honest my fingers are crossed for that second option.
The engine is now being offered for sale with a Buy It Now price of $18,049.74 USD out of Petersdorf, Germany. The seller notes that the engine is in very good used condition and that it has 68,043 kms on the clock, or approximately 42,280 miles. If you’d like to read more about it or register to bid you can visit the listing here.
Images courtesy of eBay
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
