Rolls-Royce Cullinan vs Mercedes-AMG GLE53

What's the difference?

The truly great thing about great wealth - I mean like, drop $1 million on a new Rolls-Royce with a casual yawn and a mouse click wealth - would be how great it is not having to do anything for yourself.

Personally, I would hire a chef, so I’d never have to cook again, and a pilot to fly my private jet, so I’d never have to catch pneumonia while flying 34 hours to Ibiza with strangers to do my weird job (oh, and if I was rich I wouldn’t have to work anyway), and in theory I might even hire a chauffeur for those odd times when I didn’t want to drive myself in one of my fleet of beautiful cars. 

All right, so I can’t even imagine that last one, but the most interesting fact I gleaned while in Spain, tirelessly testing the new Rolls-Royce Cullinan Series II, is that even the ridiculously rich are falling out of love with not driving these days.

Perhaps, being tech-savvy types, they can see the end of driving and the rise of autonomy coming and they want to make the most of it while they still can. But according to Rolls, the percentage of its buyers who sit in the back rather than in the driver’s seat has flipped entirely over the past 15 years.

Back in the day, 80 per cent of Rolls owners were back-seat passengers, blowing cigar smoke at the back of a chauffeur’s head, while 20 per cent actually drove their expensive motors.

Today, the number who drive themselves has soared to 80 per cent, and apparently that’s not just because it would feel weird being chauffeured around in what is now the most popular Rolls-Royce by far - the Cullinan SUV.

The other big change, apparently, is that the average age of a Rolls-Royce buyer has also dropped, from 56 to the low 40s. And that means more buyers with kids, and gold-plated prams and other associated dross, which means they need bigger Rolls-Royces, family-sized SUV ones, which again helps to explain why the Cullinan now makes up as much as half of all the brand’s sales in some markets.

And why the arrival of this, the facelifted, tweaked and twirled Series II version of a car that was greeted cynically by many in the media when it arrived (“one group was not sceptical, and that was our clients,” as a Rolls spokeswoman delightedly pointed out) is such a big deal.

You might have some traditional notions of what a 'sports car' is.

Low and light, slick and aerodynamic, purely mechanical and centred around the driver. These notions may have held true for a long time, but in an age where Lamborghini makes a Touareg-based super SUV is there room for those parameters to move?

Especially with consumer sentiment indicating the somewhat oxymoronic idea of a low-slung coupe SUV with an AMG powertrain is more than just a niche.

Mercedes told us the previous generation GLE coupe was a major success, amassing up to 25 per cent of the model line's sales split, and its research indicated  a buyer of this massive SUV was drawn to its "performance, style and technology" and was even "a motorsport fan."

Sounds like this buyer would have once been looking for a 'sports car' and like it or not, performance coupe SUVs are here to stay. But does the new GLE 53 Coupe really make for a compelling experience behind the wheel? We found out at its local launch.