Rolls-Royce cars are mythical beasts. Even if you’ve never been in one, you intuitively understand that their owners don’t sit in the seats so much as they sink deliriously until suspended perfectly in opulence. You know that they don’t play music through speakers so much as they float you inside of the song itself. And the surge of power from their hand-built V12 engines comes with just a pleasant purr.
No more. Soon, they’ll jet to highway speed without so much as a whisper. Rolls-Royce is going electric.
123 Years in the Making
“Today is the most significant day in the history of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars since 4th May, 1904,” said Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Chief Executive Officer Torsten Müller-Ötvös (umlauts are expensive, so of course the Rolls CEO has three).
“On that date, our founding fathers, Charles Rolls and Sir Henry Royce, first met and agreed that they were going to create ‘the best motor car in the world,’” Müller-Ötvös said.
Now, their inheritors agreed they were going to do the same with strictly electric power. All Rolls-Royce products, the company says, will be electric by 2030.
Müller-Ötvös noted that Charles Rolls himself wrote in 1900, “The electric car is perfectly noiseless and clean. There is no smell or vibration, and they should become very useful when fixed charging stations can be arranged. But for now, I do not anticipate that they will be very serviceable – at least for many years to come.”
123 years, apparently. Customers take delivery of the first Rolls-Royce Spectre in 2023.
The Spectre – A Coupe Worthy of a James Bond Villian
The company revealed images of the Spectre, obscured by gold text that lets us pick out the shape of the car but hides design details. It appears to be a long-hooded coupe, after the fashion of the recently discontinued Wraith.
Rolls says the Spectre will ride on the same chassis as its top-of-the-range Phantom sedan and Cullinan SUV. The platform is called – we’re not kidding you – the Architecture of Luxury. The Spectre may share components with some of parent company BMW’s recent EVs, like the iX SUV (though that car’s 516 horsepower is likely too little for a Rolls).
Electric vehicles tend to be heavier than gasoline-powered cars. But weight is hardly a consideration in a Rolls (each Phantom alone uses the leather of nine cows). And the smooth, silent power delivery of EVs could lend itself naturally to the driving experience Rolls owners expect.
That’s all we know for now. Given the $300,000-plus price tag of most Rolls-Royce products, it’s likely to be all most of us will ever know of the first electric Rolls.
Reframing Automotive Dreams
The significance of today’s announcement, then, isn’t so much that more of us will be driving electric cars in a decade. New EVs priced for the rest of us, like the Hyundai Ioniq 5 or the Ford F-150 Lightning, have already told us all that.
It’s that even the wealthy will be showing off their riches in emissions-free rolling mansions.
Müller-Ötvös ended his announcement by framing Rolls-Royce buyers as “the world’s most progressive and influential women and men,” and promised to carry them “into a brilliant, electrified future” in an emissions-free Rolls.
