The 2024 Rolls-Royce Spectre is four seats of pillarless perfection
The first all-electric car in Rolls-Royce’s 119-year history feels oddly familiar, like an old friend with a new bionic heart.
Last week I travelled to California wine country to sample Rolls-Royce Motor Cars’ new Spectre coupe, the ultraluxury brand’s first electric car, with top notes of leather, pencil box and rubber.
This enormous and exquisite four-seater has been haunting the company’s imagination for more than a century. In 1900, Charles Rolls observed that electric propulsion had many advantages over internal combustion – no smoke, smell, noise or engine vibration. Electric cars “should become very useful when fixed charging stations can be arranged”, the eventual co-founder said. In the breach, Rolls-Royce’s fuel-burners have aspired to the same lubricity, effortless power and solemn hush, as if they were electric.
Which brings us to the first of many paradoxes. Because Rolls-Royce has spent a century striving to deliver an electric-like experience – the gnostic-sounding waftability included – the real thing feels strangely familiar, like meeting an old friend with a new bionic heart.
In fact, in many corners of the car you can sense a sort of consummation, places where the technology finally delivers on a century of overblown rhetoric.
Consider, please, the problem of constraining ambient cabin noise. One of Rolls’ marketing slogans is “Silence is luxury”. Well, no engine means no engine noise. Moreover, as director of engineering Mihiar Ayoubi noted without batting an eye, a 703kg battery pack makes for an excellent sound-deadening “mass damper”. I bet it does.
The battery pack helped add 30 per cent more torsional rigidity to Rolls’ already stiff aluminium space frame. It is this architecture’s hidden, load-bearing maximums that allowed the designers to do cool and beautiful things. To wit: The Spectre is a four-seat pillarless coupe with rear-hinged “coach” doors, the widest doors in the company’s history. Eat your heart out, Oldsmobile 98.
You can tell it is a Rolls, even if you are blindfolded. The first cues are the retractable Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornament – her windblown gown re-profiled for improved aero – and the illuminated, temple-style grille, with variable-pitch shutters that can open and close. This is the widest such aperture in the company’s history. At night the grille glows like the ancient Parthenon hosting an all-you-can-eat orgy.
The Spectre is almost 6m long and more than 2m wide, on a 3.21m wheelbase, weighing 2900kg, rolling on 58cm wheels. The design brief called for a statement both “historic” and “super emotional”, said director of design Anders Warming. Up close and in person, those emotions start with awe, followed by a fleeting fear that it might somehow fall on you.
With the scale of the now retired Phantom Coupé and the lurid fastback shape of the bygone Wraith, the Spectre manages to be both scary-big and sensuous, in an Attack of the 50 Foot Woman sort of way. Among the more worldly design choices: The crisp fender lines bracketing the grille sweep up and aft, suggesting the vertical bows of ultramodern yacht design. Buyers may specify a single colour or a two-tone scheme, with the dorsal section (hood, roof, fastback) painted in a contrasting colour. I prefer the single-colour look. Do you think eggplant is too obvious?
Speaking of purple, you should see my shin. The leading edges of the doors have a bluntly pointed profile. When you open a door from the outside – electrically assisted, of course – the leading edge sweeps a huge arc that will take you right off your Louboutins.
While electrification suits the brand well, there was some tension, if you’ll pardon the pun. The “not-a-drop-of-Champagne” test, for example: This standard defines the supple and linear acceleration expected of all Rolls-Royces, such that owners should never spill a drop – and we’re not talking flutes here but the sloshy coupe glasses. If the car were allowed to deliver full torque from a standstill people would be getting those glasses stuck in their throats. Thanks to some gradualising algorithms in the motor-control programming, the Spectre’s initial acceleration (4.4 seconds to 100km/h) is notably nontraumatic.
The same is true of deceleration. To avoid any potential abruptness produced by regenerative braking, the system relies primarily on its hydraulic circuits in default mode. If drivers want more regen and more of a one-pedal response, the small B button on the gearshift wand engages a soft and posh sort of regenerative braking.
Built on a powertrain-agnostic architecture Rolls-Royce says was future-proofed for electrification, the Spectre motivates by way of front and rear-mounted motors producing up to 584hp and 644lb-ft of all-wheel drive. Sandwiched between the floor and the bottom of the car is the 102kWh battery pack, providing up to 420km of EPA-rated range.
Here’s the part where Tesla fanboys come out of the ether to say the Tesla Model S Plaid is almost twice the car (performance, range, efficiency, technology) at a quarter of the price. To them I say, all true. Now stop being a hayseed. Such buyers typically have garages full of cars, including Teslas, and manservants to keep them charged up. Rolls owners don’t have range anxiety. They have people for that. Besides, the average Rolls-Royce gets driven 5150km a year.
So the Spectre gets away with some stuff. The active air suspension with electromechanical anti-roll bars does a tremendous job of road isolation and chassis control, a job made harder with the big wheels. But a 48-volt active suspension, such as that in the Ferrari Purosangue, would have even more authority. You know how the Poms love authority.
You’d think that under that glorious hood would be an even more fabulous “frunk”, but no. That space is occupied by hardware and inscrutable black-cased enclosures. Here again, Tesla partisans might claim advantage. But rich people don’t pack up all their belongings for a road trip.
Wherever they are going, the clothes are waiting for them.
2024 ROLLS-ROYCE SPECTRE
● Base price: $633,000
● Price as tested: $803,000 (est)
● Powertrain: All-electric, with front- and rear-mounted, separately excited synchronous motors (190kW/360kW, f/r) 102kWh lithium battery pack; permanent all-wheel drive.
● Power/torque: 584hp/644lb-ft
● Max charging rate: 10-80 per cent in 34 minutes (195kW)
