The Foreign Concept of Unique Coverage

The subject of the photograph is said to be the “Baby Rolls” (codenamed RR4) under heavy disguise. This identical image appeared in a series of identical spy shots that were posted on a number of websites last month.

What’s interesting about this picture is not its darkly clad subject, but our continued interest in these spy shots and the propriety that different publications claim when posting them on a medium – the Internet – that infamously knows no such boundaries.

Car and Driver‘s paid for their own version of the above RR4 jpeg and had a graphic planted across the car’s doors that warned that the image could only be shown on caranddriver.com!

Right.

Conduct a Google search of “RR4″ as I did and you’ll get results linking to articles from Motor Trend, Autoblog, Edmunds, and Car and Driver as the top four (accurate) results. All these sites will have posted the same pictures with varied comments on the same baby Roller.

MT passively constructed: “Disguised prototypes of the all-new 2010 Rolls-Royce, codenamed RR4, have been seen testing near Munich.”

At least Autoblog’s John Neff wrote like an actual human: “We’ve shown you spy shots before of the upcoming “Baby Rolls”, dubbed internally by Rolls Royce as the RR4, but none as good as these.”

Edmunds wrote from a more official capacity. It almost sounded like they were on scene – what with dateline: “MUNICH, Germany — Spy photographers have nabbed new shots of the upcoming “baby Rolls,” internally code-named RR4.”

Car and Driver was playful, but a little too low brow for our tastes with its tag: “Rolls-Royce counters the Connie with a baby Phantom based on the next-gen BMW 7-series.”

“The Connie,” is meant to refer to Bentley’s Continental series . The Connie, guys?? Gross.

The deal is that all these publications make their business showing off these teaser shots that companies like BMW’s Rolls-Royce want you to kind-of see. Keeps you interested, or at least that’s their intent.

Heck-fire, ADL’s even posted some spy shots here, too, and doubtless I’ve written something half-baked at 2AM about how imposing those suicide doors could look like if we could only see them from underneath all that charcoal plastic.

And there’s nothing wrong with any of that, per se. It’s just – a bit over done.

But hey, that leaves you the consumer spoiled for choice of the exact same thing.