Rolls-Royce Corniche Buyer's Guide
The Corniche is the convertible Rolls-Royce with a thirty-year production life and a price curve to match: our three sold results run from £24,457 for a 1973 car to £60,887 for a 1990 example, while a Corniche V in our live listings is guided at £150,000–£180,000. Age, series and condition stratify this market more sharply than almost any other Crewe product.
Know your generations
The original Corniche (1971–1987) was the coachbuilt two-door Shadow, offered as both coupé and convertible with the 6.75-litre V8; the convertible outlived the coupé and is the body the market wants. The Corniche II (1987–1989) brought fuel injection, ABS and detail updates; the III (1989–1993) added adaptive suspension and a tidier interior; the IV (1993–1995) gained a glass rear window and airbags. After a five-year gap the Corniche V (2000–2002) returned as a 326hp, Silver Seraph-era flagship built in small numbers, and it trades in a different register: the £150,000–£180,000 estimate in our data is for a 2001 car.
What to pay
Three sold convertibles: £24,457 for a 1973 Corniche in August 2026, £27,281 for a 1980 car in May, and £60,887 in March for a 1990 example catalogued as a Corniche II; median £27,281. The pattern is clean: seventies cars in usable order sit around our £24,457 and £27,281 results, and a good late-eighties-onwards car can more than double that. Live estimates support the shape: a 1975 convertible at £30,000–£40,000, a 1981 at £70,000–£90,000 (plainly an exceptional one), and the Corniche V at £150,000–£180,000. Coupés appear rarely and generally trade below convertibles nationally.
What goes wrong
The hydraulics come first: the Shadow-derived braking and self-levelling system runs on RR363 fluid in earlier cars, and neglected accumulators, spheres and pipework generate the bills that sink cheap examples; a specialist service history for the system is the single most valuable document a Corniche can have. Rust attacks sills, wheelarches, floors and the areas around the rear spring pans, and on a coachbuilt body proper repair is expensive out of all proportion to a saloon. Hood mechanisms, West of England cloth or leather retrims, and veneer restoration are five-figure-scale crafts in any era, so buy the best interior and roof you can. The 6.75 V8 itself is durable if cooling and oil changes have been respected; heads and liners suffer when they have not.
Our view
A seventies convertible around our £24,457–£27,281 results remains the accessible way into open-top Rolls-Royce motoring, but only with the hydraulic and body history to prove someone else has paid the hard bills. The 1990 car's £60,887 shows the market's clear preference for the injected, better-sorted late cars, and they are the ones we would keep long term: mechanically supportable, properly usable, and holding a rarity the saloons never had. A cheap Corniche without a file is not a bargain; it is a deferred invoice.
