Why the Rolls-Royce Spectre isn’t a funky electric car

CALL Torsten Muller-Otvos by the acronym “TMO” and he might not mind. “It’s like my brand,” he says with a broad grin. But he might as well be “Mr Rolls-Royce” instead, for all the ways the storied car company has evolved – and flourished – under his leadership as chief executive officer since April 2010.

Without diluting the brand’s hallowed image, he grew its sales to a record 6,000 cars last year. The customisation service that he fostered, Bespoke, rakes in ever more money per car while making clients feel like their cars are unique art pieces.

Black Badge – the brand’s label for its edgy, sporty trim line – has helped demolish the idea that Rolls-Royces are fuddy-duddy machines for chauffeurs. Amazingly, Rolls’ clientele is now the most youthful of any brand within the BMW Group, even younger than Mini customers.

The Spectre’s launch has Muller-Otvos in a jaunty mood: videobombing a YouTuber’s live stream, exchanging back-slapping hugs with journalists and so on. But what looks like ebullience might simply be relief.

Rolls-Royce’s first electric car took half a dozen years to come to fruition, and Muller-Otvos spent the time obsessing over a single principle that he says the brand’s customers drummed into his head. (And who can imagine a more demanding bunch than people with Rolls-Royce money?)

“The feedback was, it needs to be a Rolls-Royce first,” Muller-Otvos recalls. “Don’t compromise. Don’t build a funky electric car. Don’t build anything with huge screens, funky devices, whatever.”

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Muller-Otvos is adamant that you can put a blindfolded person into the Spectre and he would immediately be able to tell that he was in a Rolls-Royce, from the way it smells and feels.

That’s one way to measure the Spectre’s success, but there is another. “If you buy this car now, you only get it in 2025,” Muller-Otvos says. This time, the grin is even broader.