From a fantastically huge V12 to an EV: the Rolls-Royce Spectre transformation is here, but is it any good?

Officially the starting price in Australia is $770,000, but don’t expect too much change from $1m.

The new EV Rolls Royce Spectre.

There are times in this job when you really need to decompress, or at least try to smack back into reality without cracking your skol.

Going on a Rolls-Royce launch is such a full-immersion sensory overload that I can be left feeling resentment and hatred towards the world in general, and all other cars, for days afterwards. From the moment you are greeted at the airport by someone dressed like an extra from The Crown with an accent that sounds like it ate an orchard of plums for elevenses, you are encouraged to spend as much time as possible in their cars.

This is a very happy place, not because people out in the horrible, dirty, noisy real world stare at you through the windows trying to work out who you are, but because it’s just so indolently indulgent.

After surreptitiously taking off my shoes and socks so I could bury my feet in the eight-inch deep lamb's wool carpets, I had to fight the urge to flollop around on the back seat the way a dog does when it climbs into a favourite bed.

After two hours of lolling, and LOL-ing, in the rear of a Rolls-Royce Ghost while my lovely driver was forced by professional courtesy to listen to me telling him how rubbish his country is at cricket, I checked in at a suitably ridiculous hotel in the Napa Valley and then drove to my room in a different Rolls. I half expected to find a chauffeur sleeping on the floor next to me in case I needed to toilet in the night.

The next day I got to actually drive the new Rolls-Royce Spectre, which is not only the company’s first ever electric vehicle, but the first of many – the world’s most prestigious car company has pledged to be entirely EV by 2030.

Rolls has created a modern car that feels so much like an old one.

It seems a shocking move for such a traditionalist brand, famed for making fantastically huge V12 engines, but then you hear that the company has been swamped with orders for Spectres (officially the starting price in Australia is $770,000, but don’t expect too much change from $1 million), and 40 per cent of them are from customers new to the brand.

It’s as if people have been waiting, fiddling with the spare millions in their pockets, for this all-electric super luxury coupe to come along.

And it does make a strange kind of sense, partly because Rolls owners don’t tend to take long trips in their cars anyway – they have helicopters and jets for that – so range isn’t really an issue, but driving in the centre of a town like London in a zero-emission vehicle is.

Then there’s the fact that “Silence” has always been a brand pillar for Rolls; you barely ever heard the engines in its old cars anyway (apparently when the first versions of Spectre were tested, they were so quiet that people found it “disturbing”, and some natural noise had to be engineered back in).

A Rolls must also be “Effortless” to drive, which means you can just plonk it in drive – their cars have never allowed gauche things like shift paddles or sport modes – and crush all before you with your imperious, surging thrust.

The Spectre has just one gear, like all EVs, which makes the delivery of its continent-crushing torque – 900Nm of it, plus a supercar-like 430kW – utterly seamless, and seemingly unending.

While it is freakishly silent, the Spectre feels perhaps more car-like than any other EV I’ve driven – or, more accurately, it feels more like the cars it is descended from. In the Spectre, Rolls has created a modern car that feels so much like an old one, at least in driving dynamics (they’ve also eschewed the trend for a tech-heavy or screen-laden interior).

The Spectre feels perhaps more car-like than any other EV I’ve driven.

You can drive this thing with just the tips of your fingers, the steering is that easy, and somehow, despite weighing almost three tonnes and taking up as much physical space as a small English pub, it can handle tight corners with aplomb, and even some vigour.

The final Rolls pillar is “Waftability”, which means the kind of ride quality that makes it feel like you might be driving around on grandma’s feather bed.

Broken road surfaces are not your problem, and you glide over them with a beatific grin. Interestingly, the Spectre is not the kind of Roller one sits in the back of – they have other models for that. It’s a two-plus-two, with room for spoiled children in the rear. This means that Rolls decided it wanted its first EV to be driven, and to be a driver’s car, and that is what it has delivered.

And, as one staffer explained to me, Rolls owners all have plenty of room at home to install a charger and have a chauffeur to plug it in for them, and will be quite happy never to visit a petrol station again. The Spectre can allegedly drive 520km between charges, but the company claims it will do that much and more.

After being wafted from posh dinners to wine tastings in various Rolls (on a previous Rolls launch I was allowed to hold a Fabergé egg), I returned to real life with the kind of shocked horror you might feel if you’d accidentally set fire to a winning lottery ticket.

I’m going to go and cry, just a bit, in my very ordinary VW Golf now. I may be some time.

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Rolls-Royce Spectre

ENGINE: Two permanently excited synchronous motors, one on each axle
TRANSMISSION: One-speed, all-wheel drive
EFFICIENCY: 21.5kWh per 100km, range 520km
PRICE: $770,000
RATING: Four maps out of five