While Aston Martin and Bentley make the most of their remaining tanks of petrol, Britain’s poshest marque is whispering its way into the plug-in future. Over to our man in California...
WORDS OLLIE KEW PHOTOGRAPHY MARK FAGELSON
This isn’t a car that requires a review. Rolls-Royce customers do not concern themselves with the views of the unwashed proletariat. If they did, they’d have waited to hear what it’s like, instead of already ordering so many it’s sold out until the middle of 2025.
The car is the Rolls-Royce Spectre, and it’s not just the first fully electric product of the modern Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Ltd which BMW seeded in 1998. Since Charles met Henry 119 years ago, no production spec car in their marque’s potted history has been battery powered.
Occasionally, Rolls-Royce itself likes to pay attention to journalists. In 1907, a writer in Britain’s The Autocar declared the underwhelmingly named 40/50hp model was “the best car in the world”. Granted, he only had about three to choose from back then, but Rolls was only too happy to adopt that verdict as the company’s semi-official slogan, emblazoning it prominently on its marketing materials for most of the ensuing century.
Claude Johnson, the cofounder who styled himself as the hyphen in Rolls-Royce, also saw the value in pinching a hack’s nickname for his marketing car, which was decorated with aluminium-coloured paint and polished brightwork. That’s how the 40/50hp became the Silver Ghost. So, the latest Rolls named after a supernatural apparition might not need validation, but you never know. Could come in useful...
The Spectre is a truly immense coupe. That glinting grille is lower and wider than a Phantom’s Parthenon-esque facade and the corners of its bonnet taper gently downwards instead of standing as upright as a bearskin-topped guardsman, but these nods to slippery aerodynamics don’t diminish the gravitational presence this mighty two-door generates even when painted one colour rather than the oddly indecisive combo of Salamanca Blue with Arctic White in Aero Two-Tone.
Behind a newly streamlined flying lady, the vast bonnet doesn’t conceal a clever front boot or some sort of foldaway dinner set. Just a dressed cover for one of the motors and control electronics, which could double as a medium-sized aircraft carrier. During the lunchtime stroll it takes to travel down the front wing you pass waist high 23-inch wheels with the usual non-rotating centre caps. Sometime before tea you’ll arrive at the sort of handle banks use on maximum security vault doors. You’ve earned a sit down.
