Rolls-Royce’s First Electric Car Has Two Doors and a “Private Sky”

Rolls-Royce will start production of its first electric car next year. It only has two doors, however it is longer than a full-size SUV. Among its numerous options, the Specter will be offered with stars on the doors.

The British ultra-luxury car brand has been offering a feature called the “Starlight Headliner” for years, which fills the ceiling with thousands of tiny lights. These fiber optic cable ends look random but are arranged to resemble the night sky over Goodwood, UK, where the Rolls-Royce factory is located. With the Specter, Rolls-Royce is adding this feature to the interior of the doors, which will have an additional 5,876 “stars” so that occupants are fully surrounded by them.

Also, despite not needing as much air as Rolls-Royce’s V12-powered cars, the Specter will have the widest grille ever seen on a company model. Still, it’s the most aerodynamic yet, according to the company, which claims the car has a drag coefficient of 0.25. This is an interesting coefficient, but it is not revolutionary.

Even an electric Rolls-Royce could hardly do without the grille, as the headstone-shaped vertical slab of metal slats is among the most genuinely iconic in the industry.

“Spectre is as important to us as the Silver Ghost may have been many, many years ago and is the entry into a new era for the all-electric brand by 2030,” said Rolls-Royce Chief Executive Torsten Müller-Ötvös. , in an interview with CNN Business. “So we want to make sure that this car is really correct and on the spot and it’s a proper and perfect Rolls Royce.”

The Silver Ghost, which first entered production in 1906, is considered the car that established Rolls-Royce’s reputation as the pinnacle of automotive quality.

The Specter shares its basic structure with the brand’s gasoline-powered models: the Phantom and Ghost sedans and the Cullinan SUV. This follows the strategy of Rolls-Royce’s parent company BMW, which also relies on flexible engineering that can be used to build gasoline and electric cars.

In the traditional style, the model’s two doors are hinged at the back and open to the rear — on models with four, only the rear doors open this way. Because of its size and space, Roll-Royce calls the Specter a “super coupé”. It’s about six inches longer and five inches wider than the last Rolls-Royce coupe, the Wraith, which has not been produced since the beginning. It’s also about 2.5 inches longer than a Cadillac Escalade SUV and slightly wider. Four-wheel steering makes the car more agile in tight corners.

The overall conical shape was influenced by yachts, according to Rolls-Royce, similar to another recent model, perhaps the most expensive car ever made. Last year, the brand launched a convertible called the Boat Tail, of which only three were built at an estimated price of $25 million each.

While many electric cars have extremely large touchscreens and rely on them for many internal controls, the Specter will rely more on physical controls, Müller-Ötvös said. There will be screens, but their use will be more discreet, he says.

The total weight of the model is just over 3 tonnes – around 272 kg more than a Cullinan SUV – it includes over 680 kg of soundproofing, to ensure the optimum level of Rolls-Royce silence. Typically, automakers try to save weight when making electric cars to make up for all the mass that the batteries themselves add. But for the company, weight was never a big issue. Their cars are expected to be, literally, massive.

The 557-horsepower car will be able to go from zero to 96 km/h in about 4.4 seconds and will be able to drive about 418 km before needing to recharge. That, insists Müller-Ötvös, will be enough.

“We would never compromise the car’s experience or its appearance purely for range,” he said.