Rolls-Royce Reveals the Spectre, a Massive, Maximally Badass EV Super Coupe
The “spiritual successor” to the Phantom coupe, the conservatively styled 2024 Rolls-Royce Spectre EV breaks little new ground stylewise but, as an EV, heralds a major sea change for the 116-year-old carmaker.
Its smooth dual-motor electric powertrain should complement traditional Rolls-Royce virtues of quiet and calm, with a carefully engineered, heavily assisted electronic chassis that’s promised to deliver a “magic carpet ride.”Power should be sufficient, in the Rolls tradition: 577 horsepower and 664 pound-feet of torque, enough to get the coupe to 60 mph in a claimed 4.4 seconds. The first cars will reach customers in late 2023.
“The electric car is perfectly noiseless and clean. There is no smell or vibration. They should become very useful when fixed charging stations can be arranged.”
So said Charles Stewart Rolls in the year 1900, six years before he’d come to launch the gasoline-fired Rolls Royce Motor Cars concern with Henry Royce. Rolls predicted a future that seems likely to come to pass starting now as the company bearing the two men’s famous surnames has just fired the opening salvo in a mission to sell nothing but electrically propelled motorcars by the year 2030.
The virtues of electric propulsion seem especially suited to those claimed by the concern since its inception, only never will these sterling attributes—instant torque and near silent operation—have been more fully realized than they will be here. While the 102EX, Rolls’s Phantom-based electric concept car, made the press rounds in 2012, the Spectre entering production late next year incorporates a decade’s worth of new technology and investment, and it shows.
It’s a Rolls, All Right
To look at the Spectre, however, is to see the unmistakable form of a modern Rolls-Royce coupe. It would have been easy, perhaps easier, to make the first electric offering an SUV, as Mihiar Ayoubi, the company’s director of engineering, told us, but it was not the expression of luxury the company was after. Almost 18 feet long and seven feet wide, the four-seat Spectre fastback is an unabashed rich person’s express that bows before no one. Riding on a 126-inch wheelbase, it tips the scales at 6559 pounds unladen, with a Brobdingnagian turning circle of almost 42-feet, even with standard four-wheel steering. Environmental efficiency may be the goal, and it may be as claimed the most aerodynamic Roller ever, but there is nothing particularly futuristic, downsized, or less than maximally badass about the Spectre. Not that we would have expected otherwise.
There’ll Always Be an England
Taking in the visuals, its lower than traditional expression of Rolls’s Pantheon grille, handsomely backlit in the way of so many new electric models, is flanked by split headlights for a fresh take on an old look. The firm’s widest grille ever, it reminds us that BMW, the industry’s most ardent champion of oversize front apertures, writes the checks for Rolls. Behind that record-setting grille is not a frunk, but a proper machine room to house the voluminous hard- and softwares behind an intensely complicated suspension, with dedicated controls for each of 141,200 separate sender-receiver variables, which help it rapidly anticipate and execute needed adjustments of shock and anti-roll-bar settings to adapt to coming road conditions—for instance, temporarily decoupling the anti-roll bars for brief intervals to spare unseemly intrusions on occupants’ comfort.
The achievement of silken ride properties was made more challenging by the fact that the Spectre’s variation on Rolls’s flexible aluminum space-frame chassis architecture as seen in its other current models boasts 30 percent more torsional rigidity than ever before, making the business of keeping it settled and comfortable more daunting if not impossible. A lower center of gravity—courtesy of its substantial batteries’ location low down in the center of the car, with motors riding between both front and rear axles—will aid flat cornering. Heavy though they are, the batteries, it is observed, double as more than 1500 pounds of additional sound deadening. Along with all the other tricks Rolls has learned about quieting the cabin, engineers actually had to work to reintroduce some sound to the interior, though as yet no artificial sound enhancement of the ersatz internal-combustion variety is planned.
Sufficient Power—and 260 Miles of Range
In keeping with this overriding spirit of civility, Rolls chose not to participate in the senseless horsepower wars that have captivated many an EV maker of late, settling on motive force figures not dissimilar from one of its current V-12 battle cruisers. While final EPA figures have not been announced, its twin motors’ combined 577 horsepower and 664 pound-feet of torque are expected to move the big coupe to 60 mph in 4.4 seconds, which is plenty fast in our book—”sufficient,” in Rolls Royce’s delightfully vague former description—yet not so rapid as to risk passenger nausea and driver blackouts under hard acceleration. Significant regeneration with one-foot driving was felt to be off-brand and unlikely to be in attendance, while a top speed of 155 miles is anticipated along with an all-electric estimated EPA range of 260 miles. We’ll know more once we drive it next year.
Recent investment in the company’s enviro-friendly Goodwood plant in Sussex will allow bodies—pressed in Germany, then shipped to England—to be assembled and finished on the same line as the firm’s other models, adding to flexibility. Rolls’s copious and growing list of options and bespoke upgrades includes newly available Starlight doors, with 4796 “stars” subtly lighting up the door and rear side panels the way the popular Starlight headliner option (pictured above) already does.
How Much?
Rolls-Royce predicts Spectre base pricing will fall somewhere between the Cullinan ($351,250) and Phantom ($460,000); $400,000 or so might be a good guess.
With 2.5 million test miles claimed and numerous marketing clinics with Rolls’s faithful under its belt, the firm is confident that its entry into the as yet unpopulated ultraluxury EV super-coupe market will be ready for success when it reaches customers in the fourth quarter of 2023. Order books are filling rapidly, we are told, and sometime during its first year on sale, the company predicts, the Spectre will provide 20 percent of the company’s overall volume. Lending credence to the prediction, Rolls reveals that its typical owner is, surprisingly, today the youngest of any ultraluxury brand.
Now if only, heeding Charles Rolls’s instruction, they can get the world’s fixed-charging-station situation fixed.
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