Rolls-Royce joins the EV fray with its first fully-electric car: the Spectre.
Within the next ten years, Rolls-Royce will become a fully-electric brand. While you might associate the brand with something like the V12-powered Phantom or Cullinan — I can’t blame you there — it has been hinting at electrification for the past several years. But those were just concepts, and this Spectre EV will actually head to production.
At the moment, Rolls-Royce just released a few prototype teasers with some evocative slogans. “When it does not exist, design it”, “strive for perfection” and the like. All the writing aside, this is the latest signal of the luxury brand’s intent to move away from internal combustion, which it says it will do entirely by 2030. So far as the Rolls-Royce Spectre is concerned, the development car will see 1.5 million miles of testing before it actually goes on sale in late 2023.
Want to know exactly what sort of performance this otherworldly coupe will bring? So would we, but Rolls-Royce is not releasing too many details at this point. It will sit on the same aluminum spaceframe ‘Architecture of Luxury’ platform that underpins the Phantom, Ghost and Cullinan.
Beyond that, we’d fully expect any electric Roller to pack the same sort of surging performance that the current 6.75-liter V12 offers. To that end, it’s likely Rolls-Royce will fit a dual-motor, all-wheel drive setup here. I wouldn’t necessarily expect neck-snapping acceleration to be high on the brand’s priority list, but that could be a byproduct of fitting electric motors potent enough to haul around the sort of luxurious interior you might expect. So, quicker speeds than what we see in the Ghost, for example, could be a byproduct of the electric transformation.
As ever, time will tell, and hopefully we’ll know much more in the coming year prior to the Spectre’s launch. This coupe’s just the start, too. In time, we’ll almost certainly see an electric SUV and sedan emerge.
