Rolls-Royce Spectre: The S$2m electric car that everyone wants

By Derryn Wong

THAT Rolls-Royce’s first full-production electric vehicle (EV) is the quietest car I’ve ever been in is probably not a surprise. The fact that it’s not even halfway done yet, is.

Christened Spectre, in line with Rolls-Royce’s penchant for invoking the spirit world with its cars’ names, the battery-powered super coupe won’t enter production until the tail-end of 2023. In the meantime, an army of engineers is working flat-out, not just to finish the car, but to perfect it. 

“It will be a Rolls-Royce first and an electric vehicle, second,” Thorsten Muller-Otvos, the chief executive officer of BMW Group’s most luxurious brand, told The Business Times at Autodrome de Miramas, the group’s private and secretive test track. “That means no compromises anywhere, in quality, in driving, in design … everything.” 

Muller-Otvos tends to speak eloquently for Rolls-Royce, but the Spectre’s silence spoke volumes about what the brand’s first EV will be like. I rode shotgun with lead engineer Jorg Wunder while he gave a heavily-camouflaged development mule a decent caning around Miramas.

By my ears’ judgement, we were doing 90 km/h, but I asked him how fast we were going. “About 150 km/h,” he deadpanned, before laughing at my obvious surprise. “It’s still far from perfect,” he quickly added. “At this point, we are really only 40 per cent done.”

It is so early in the Spectre’s development that I have no idea what it actually looks like. Most of the dashboard was covered up by thick fabric sheets when I rode inside. The car will have twin electric motors; the battery pack will be BMW Group’s largest capacity unit, but Rolls-Royce has kept enigmatically silent about how powerful it will be or how far it can travel on a single charge.

The only thing outsiders can be certain of is that the Spectre is on track to be the first hyper-luxury EV on the market with no direct competition. BT estimates that, after local taxes and import duties, it will cost around S$2 million in Singapore.

But Muller-Otvos is confident that buyers here will snap it up, largely because the Spectre sits at the confluence of two booming sectors: luxury goods and EVs. Unlike other prestige car makers such as Bentley and Ferrari, Rolls-Royce will skip hybrids entirely and go straight to full-electric propulsion. By 2030, it will switch its entire range over to EVs.

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“We’ve decided to go from 12-cylinder combustion engines straight to electric-only propulsion. Our clients don’t do long distance commutes. We know that electric propulsion fits perfectly with the brand, and also, it’s future-proof,” Muller-Otvos said. “Because of that, Spectre will be the most anticipated Rolls-Royce ever.”

Why not go electric with a more conventional Rolls-Royce, such as a limousine? “We felt we needed to do something emotionally spectacular, for a car that marks this important moment,” he said. In other words, the Spectre might actually represent a reboot for Rolls-Royce.

One indication that Rolls-Royce is changing its approach to creating automobiles altogether is the fact that BT had a chance to kick the Spectre’s tyres at such an early stage of its development. Journalists are never welcome near a prototype car, let alone inside one.

Yet, the Spectre is ushering in a new, data-driven way of making sure its electric cars continue to feel like Rolls-Royces. One example is Flagbearer, a new system that scans the road and continually adjusts the various suspension systems to create a magic carpet ride.

Computing power is distributed around the Spectre, so major subsystems have their own processors, but everything is networked with up to 3 times as much data flow as current models.

Rolls-Royce’s head of engineering Mihiar Ayoubi said this enables the car to respond more quickly and intelligently to driving conditions, and it creates the dynamic behaviour of a Rolls-Royce in “high definition”.

What exactly that means for customers is something I had a taste of on the roads surrounding Miramas. While I didn’t take the wheel (imagine the setback for Rolls-Royce if an idiot journalist crashed a prototype now), it is clear even at this stage that the Spectre already operates at a high level.

The near-complete absence of tyre noise was deeply impressive, as was the fact that, despite running on huge 23-inch wheels, the Spectre felt more comfortable and composed than the current Phantom limousine.

Meanwhile, the high-speed run at the Miramas test track revealed that the car has a deep well of smoothly-delivered power. It stayed composed in fast corners, and retained its vault-like lack of noise even when flying over a section of the track designed to simulate rough roads.

In other words, it felt like a Rolls-Royce, so much so that it is astonishing to think that the engineers feel they still have another 60 per cent of their job ahead of them. While most car makers want a key new model to enter the market with a bang, the Spectre is one that has to do it in total silence.