Meet the new Rolls-Royce Ghost. The British company calls this ultra-premium luxury ride the most technologically advanced Rolls yet. That’s certainly true. It’s the first of the carmaker’s sedans to have all-wheel-drive, and it has a rear-steering mechanism to help tighten the lengthy beast’s turning radius and make it float effortlessly between lanes at highway speeds. It includes ultra-bright LED headlights, a Flagbearer system, as it’s called, that reads the road ahead via cameras to prep the suspension for changes in the road surface, and a satellite-aided transmission pre-selects gears of optimum acceleration through corners. There’s also the Planar Suspension System, which includes a second damper in the front suspension intended to smooth out even the most miniscule road imperfections.

That’s all fantastic, highly innovative stuff, and it absolutely makes the car the most technologically advanced in the company’s history. But it’s not, by ordinary standards, the most technologically advanced on the road. Plenty of other cars have better connectivity, far more sophisticated driver assistance systems, and tons or little tech details stuffed into every corner. So why wouldn't the most premium carmaker in the world not include all that stuff in addition to innovating the tech--not just the engineering--on its own? There are two key reasons for this, as I discovered while test-driving the new Ghost in Austin Texas last month.