Claiming to be the best is, as a rule, a mug's game. The New Zealand rugby team has been doing it for years. The All Blacks run about beating everybody under the sun and then, come the World Cup, realise that actually they're a bit crap and fail to even make the semi-finals, causing the inhabitants of that country to rend their garments in despair. It's hilarious.

The problem with such self-proclaimed pre-eminence is that you get held up to impossible standards. If a hoodie gets knifed in London and Sky News goes ballistic, to us it is evidence of a serious moral decline in England, that place of grand expectations. If someone here gets knifed in a house robbery, well, you know. It happens.

Only very seldom does saying "I am the best" work out. But – and you can trust me on this one – it does for Rolls-Royce. The first sign is that the people at Rolls-Royce South Africa don't look at you through half an eye when they say it. They're not subtly checking to see if such a claim raises an eyebrow. They don't need to.

Because as far as they're concerned the Phantom is the best car in the world. Affirmation of this fact is not required. Neither is morale-boosting praise. When the truth is cast in stone, it just isn't necessary.

The Phantom is absolutely enormous. It is six metres long, a metre longer than a Range Rover and almost as tall. From the driving seat the Spirit of Ecstasy, that famous Rolls-Royce mascot, seems impossibly far away. Everything else seems so small on the road. It's like you took a wrong turn and ended up in Minitown.

The design is wilfully modern and deeply striking. It is not what you'd call a pretty car; rather, it is imposing. It is grand, bold, big and undoubtedly aristocratic. The wheels are huge – far bigger that those of an ordinary 4x4. This is to ensure that the car avoids the Tonka toy look, with a massive body and small wheels. It is perfectly proportioned, like Queen Latifah or Montserat Caballé, and profoundly, intensely sexy.

They thought hard about this car. They didn't just take a big car and cram it with goodies. In some cases less is more. So there's no rev counter, which I assume they quite rightly think of as gaudy and vulgar; instead, there is a dial that measures what percentage of power is in reserve. Now that's classy. And the Spirit of Ecstasy is automatic: it vanishes into a compartment when you lock the car so that scumbags don't try to steal it. Now that's clever. And the Rolls-Royce logo in the centre of the wheels is attached on a bezel, and doesn't spin with the rest of the wheel. Now that's just brilliant.

But the Phantom is not a retrospective, it is no pastiche of some imagined past. It is as modern and as up to date as it can be – it's just that all the computing power and all those buttons are tastefully hidden away. Consider the screen from which you control everything: at the press of a button it will swivel around to be replaced by a charming, drawing-room style analogue clock.

The notion of dignity lies behind much of the design. The rear doors are "coach doors", or what most people know as suicide doors, opening the "wrong" way. This allows for a dignified exit. A button on the pillar closes the rear door automatically. Slamming doors is graceless too, so you merely push the door gently to, and the Phantom sucks it in and locks it. Should you find yourself exiting the car in rain, Rolls-Royce has thoughtfully placed two beautifully embossed umbrellas inside the rear doors. They are teflon-coated, of course, so that they don’t rot in their storage compartment. Details, details…

Virtually all cars have something about them that's not quite right, a little niggling trifle that could be improved, and sometimes these flaws are what endear you to the thing. But not the Phantom. Every single tiny detail – and there are countless of them – is immaculate. The shape of the window buttons, and the way they feel to operate, for example, can only have been the result of many meetings and hours and hours of deliberation. The engineering alone, so often forgotten in car design, is simply astonishing.