Meet Spectre, Rolls-Royce’s fully electric new car

The Rolls-Royce Spectre all-electric super-luxury car will undergo global testing soon. Photos: Rolls-Royce

Rolls-Royce Motors has just announced that it will soon start on-road testing of its first full-electric car, and by 2030 all of its products will be fully electric.

Named Spectre, the electric Rolls is soon to undergo 2.5 million kilometres of global testing and is underpinned by Rolls-Royce’s own spaceframe architecture, with its launch in 2023. The Spectre fulfils the prophecy made by the marque’s founder, Charles Rolls, in 1900.

Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Chief Executive Officer, Torsten Müller-Ötvös, said the announcement today was the “most significant day in the history of Rolls-Royce Motor Car” Since Rolls met Sir Henry Royce on May 4, 1904 and agreed that they were going to create ‘the best motor car in the world’.  

The Rolls-Royce Spectre will be launched in late 2023.

“The cars they created, introduced to the world a true luxury experience and secured for Rolls-Royce the ultimate pinnacle position that it continues to occupy, unchallenged, to this day.  The marque has continued to define the very best in internal combustion motoring for more than a century,” said Müller-Ötvös.

“Today, 117 years later, I am proud to announce that Rolls-Royce is to begin the on-road testing programme for an extraordinary new product that will elevate the global all-electric car revolution and create the first – and finest – super-luxury product of its type. This is not a prototype. It’s the real thing, it will be tested in plain sight and our clients will take first deliveries of the car in the fourth quarter of 2023.”

It’s not the first ‘electric’ car from the marque. In 2011, the marque released Phantom Experimental Electric (EE), codenamed 102EX; a fully operational and road-legal battery-electric version of its pinnacle product.

The Spectre is underpinned by Rolls-Royce’s own spaceframe architecture

Phantom EE was never intended for production, serving instead as a working test-bed for clients, VIPs, the media and enthusiasts to experience electric propulsion and share their experiences, thoughts and considerations directly with Rolls-Royce designers and engineers.

“In 2011 we revealed 102EX, a fully operational all-electric Phantom. We followed this in 2016 with our fully electric 103EX, which represented our vision for the marque several decades into the future,” said Müller-Ötvös.

“These extraordinary products prompted a huge amount of interest in electric powertrain technology amongst our clients. They considered it as the perfect fit for Rolls-Royce. And, over the past decade, I have been repeatedly asked, ‘When will Rolls-Royce go electric?’ and ‘When will you produce your first electric car?’

“I answered with an unambiguous promise: ‘Rolls-Royce will go electric, starting this decade.’ Today, I’m keeping my word.”