The Rolls-Royce Spectre
The Rolls-Royce Spectre
In 1900, Rolls-Royce co-founder, Charles Rolls, spoke about an electric future for the motor car.
Having acquired an electric vehicle named The Columbia Electric Carriage, he foresaw its suitability as a clean, noiseless alternative to the internal combustion engine – providing there was sufficient infrastructure to support it.
And today, more than 120 years later, the time has come for Rolls-Royce Motor Cars to fulfil the prophecy of its founding father.
In unveiling Spectre, it is being heralded as 'the world’s first ultra-luxury electric super coupé'.
Thinking of making the switch to electric?
From the front, Spectre’s split headlight treatment is intersected by the widest grille ever bestowed on a Rolls-Royce. The vanes of the Pantheon grille are now smoother in section and a flusher fit, designed to help guide the air around the motor car’s front.
The proportional demands of Spectre’s scale required Rolls-Royce to embolden its wheel strategy. Spectre is the first production two-door coupé to be equipped with 23-inch wheels in almost one hundred years.
Inside, Spectre is provisioned with the most technologically advanced bespoke features yet.
The all-new front seat design has been inspired by British tailoring, with lapel sections that can be rendered in contrasting or matching colours to the main base. Bespoke stitching, embroidery and intricate piping has, as ever, been considered in their inception.
The final power, acceleration and range figures are still being refined, as the extraordinary undertaking of finessing Spectre enters its final phase before concluding in the second quarter of 2023. Preliminary data shows that Spectre is expected to have an all-electric range of 320 miles/520 kilometres WLTP and offer 900Nm of torque from its 430kW powertrain. It is anticipated to achieve 0-60mph in 4.4 seconds (0-100km/h in 4.5 seconds).
For Spectre, Rolls-Royce’s engineers have seen much of their discipline pivot from the workshop to the digital space. Spectre is the most connected Rolls-Royce in history, and in harnessing the power of the motor car’s remarkable Decentralised Intelligence processing capabilities there is more requirement than ever for expert human experience.
To ensure the continuity of the Rolls-Royce experience, as well as its progression, the marque selected the most experienced test and development engineers to lead the project, some of whom have been with the marque for more than two decades and were responsible for creating the first ‘Goodwood-era’ Phantom. These engineers describe the experience offered by Spectre as akin to “Rolls-Royce in high definition” on account of the speed and accuracy of the motor car’s response to a worldwide spread of road and weather conditions.
For this to be realised, a dedicated control has been handmade for each of the 141,200 sender-receiver variables, and in nearly all cases engineers have designed several more sub-variables for variations in climate, ground speed, road type, vehicle status and driving style. These have been crafted over the course of Spectre’s 2.5 million kilometre testing programme both on advanced proving grounds and on real roads around the world.
Spectre is available for commission immediately, with first deliveries starting in Q4 2023. Spectre pricing will be positioned between Cullinan and Phantom.
