(FORTUNE Magazine) – Connoisseurs of the car salesman's art won't want to miss this one. With Rolls-Royce, Bentley, and Maybach creating a new market niche somewhere north of extravagant, a spectacle is in the making: three car companies competitively pitching the richest customers in the world. Of course, the unwashed won't get to witness it, because the exercise is, by its nature, exclusive. But what might it be like to be seduced by the best?

This is going to call for a bit of method acting.

Rolls-Royce, doubtless aware that as a FORTUNE employee I hold AOL Time Warner stock options and thus am potentially worth billions, has extended an invitation to the secret location in New Jersey where it is keeping the only new Rolls in North America. What to wear? A tweed jacket and slacks, I think, but no tie. The super-rich don't have to wear ties. Watch? A Timex Indiglo. The Rolex is for the person still aspiring to own AOL Time Warner stock options. Transportation? One could take the G4 to Teterboro Airport, as some Rolls customers have done. But for my itinerary it will be quicker to drive the vintage Cherokee.

Over the bridge, through the swamp, past the Medieval Times Restaurant, and into a perfectly drab industrial park. The low brick building bearing the Rolls address has no charm, and no logo. But then I am ushered inside--into a hidden lair of gleaming metal, blond wood, and radical technology--by Secret Agent Q.

Actually it is George Walish, general manager of North American Sales for Project Rolls-Royce. But he does have gray hair and lots of amazing hardware to demonstrate, starting with a scale model of the new Rolls factory on the Goodwood Estate in Sussex, England--where Rolls buyers may be invited to dine with the Earl and Countess of March at their castle. "It's an experience money can't buy," Walish says. He is wearing a tie imprinted with tiny likenesses of the Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornament, and a Rolex, poor man.

The car itself is ... nowhere to be seen. Not yet. First we spend an hour before a flat-panel display, with Walish explaining "Rolls-Royce luxury, as distinct from British luxury or German luxury." Ingredients include "waft-ability" (lots of low-end torque), solid wood, tall seating, switches like organ stops, and an umbrella concealed in the left rear door.

We move, at last, into a darkened room. An orchestral composition from the score of the movie The Piano begins to play. Dim lights glimmer and flash, and we glimpse the outline of the new Rolls-Royce--doing a striptease. Encased in a tubular curtain of gauze, it revolves on a turntable, bursts of light illuminating now a boot, now a bonnet, now a section of aluminum skin. The house lights come up, the gauze tube is hoisted into the air, and she stands before us, exposed, huge, and beautiful.

So far, Walish has made this presentation to 125 people, by invitation only, in this and two other secret locations. Of those people, 102 have committed to buy. All have signed agreements not to disclose what they have seen. None has taken a test-drive. Only 15% have asked the price.

I am impressed. But before ordering, I want to check in with the Maybach people, who, as it happens, are just a 20-minute waft up the Garden State Parkway.

In the Maybach showroom there is ... no car. Period. And there won't be any. "Acquiring this car is about going through the commissioning experience, not just going into a dealership and saying, 'Oh, I'll take that,' " says Maybach brand manager Wayne Killen, a tall young man in a splendid suit. He leads the way into a Commissioning Studio, where we begin with a computer-animated movie. On a flat screen, a virtual Maybach revolves in a virtual Roman Pantheon to an original composition by Hans Zimmer, who won an Oscar for his score for The Lion King.

Using a 3-D virtual-reality display, we put together my Maybach on the screen. Dark blue, with cherry trim. I want the optional electroluminescent roof panel, which can go from transparent to opaque at the touch of a button. Heated steering wheel, refrigerator, rear seats that give a pneumatic massage. My favorite item is the wine bottle holder, which deploys a little metal tray that's held in place by a magnetized spot on the transmission tunnel. There are upholstery samples; I favor the suede from cows kept in pens, not barbed-wire enclosures, so that their hides won't get scratched.

At this point I'm undecided. I may not be able to test-drive a Rolls, and I may not be able even to touch a Maybach, but I want them both. I understand that this is about exclusivity; it has been at least since the 1930s, when King Zog of Albania--according to a story that may be apocryphal, but what the hell--tried to buy a Bugatti Royale, and Ettore Bugatti refused to sell him one because he felt the king had poor table manners.

But what about the Bentley?

The marketing people at Bentley won't return my phone calls. They understand what it means to be really exclusive. Either that or they know something about my AOL Time Warner stock options.