Electric Rolls: We ride in all-new Spectre EV on road and track in France
► High temperatures and high speeds don’t ruffle super-coupeIt’s one of the hottest days on record, but the inside of Rolls-Royce Spectre prototype number 20 is cool, calm… and cosmetically a bit of a mess.
So the production Spectre will be a super-coupe – around the same size and shape as the now defunct Phantom Coupe – with all-wheel drive, batteries under the floor, motors front and rear, rear-wheel steering, a new suspension system and more advanced electronics than any Rolls ever before.We do two laps in the passenger seat of the Spectre at the BMW-owned Miramis test track.
Here the Spectre confirms how good the rear-wheel steering is at appearing to shrink the car’s length, and how effective its electronic roll stabilisation system is. Using data from scanners looking at the road ahead, combined with information from the sat-nav, it decouples the anti-roll bars on straight roads, to allow each wheel to act independently, thus preventing the rocking motion that can occur when one side of the car hits a bump.
What there definitely won’t be is a choice of driving modes – Comfort, Sport, etc. The steering and accelerator pedal will leave the Goodwood factory in Rolls’ optimised configurations, and there they’ll stay. ‘We also made the decision that this car you could not get electric and combustion. The Spectre is only electric. All future Rolls-Royces, new ones, will be only electric, whilst maintaining what Rolls-Royce stands for. This should be the most dynamic RR ever in history. And it is.’‘This architecture is the architecture for all future Rolls-Royces. They might see very different technologies, they might see different shapes.
‘From an historical perspective, Spectre is one of the most important cars since the [1906] Silver Ghost, when the foundation of the brand was laid. Also knowing that we are fulfulling Charles Rolls’ prophecy [that electric vehicles were the future]. I always when I talk about it get goosebumps.
‘Our task is to teach each component and system how to think, behave and communicate like a Rolls-Royce, which sees much of the engineering pivot from workshops into the digital space,’ says engineering director Mihiar Ayoubi. ‘This is a big step forward for our brand, but also for electrification – even though Spectre is in its infancy, I can confirm that the technology is able to contain the Rolls-Royce experience.
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