The first electric Rolls-Royce
Rolls-Royce will start production of its first electric car next year. It has only two doors but is longer than a full-size SUV. And among its innumerable options, the Spectre will be offered with stars in the doors.
The British ultra-luxury car brand has for years offered a feature called the “Starlight Headliner,” filling the ceiling with an array of thousands of tiny lights. The lights, which are actually the tips of fiber-optic cables, look random but are, in fact, arranged to look like the night sky over Goodwood, UK, the location of the Rolls-Royce factory.
With the Spectre, Rolls-Royce is adding this feature to the insides of the doors which will have an additional 5,876 “stars” so occupants are fully surrounded by glittering points of light.
Also, despite not needing nearly as much air as Rolls-Royce’s V12-powered cars, the Spectre will have the widest grille ever seen on a Rolls-Royce model. Still, the Spectre is the most aerodynamic Rolls-Royce yet, according to the company, which claims the car has a drag coefficient of 0.25. That’s fairly sleek, but just in the ballpark among modern electric cars.
Even an electric Rolls-Royce could hardly go without the grille, though, since the upright, tombstone-shaped slab of metal slats is among the most genuinely iconic in the industry.
The “Spectre is for us, as important as Silver Ghost might have been many, many years ago and it is the entry into a new era for the brand going full electric by 2030,” Rolls-Royce chief executive Torsten Müller-Ötvös said in an interview with CNN Business. “So, we want to make sure that this car is really right and spot on and is a proper, perfect Rolls Royce.”
The 557 horsepower car will be able to go from zero to 60 miles an hour in about 4.4 seconds and will be able drive about 260 miles before needing to recharge. That, Müller-Ötvös insists, will be enough.
