Along with just about every other carmaker on the planet, British firm Rolls-Royce has laid out a roadmap to electrification, one that will see it become an electric-only brand by 2030. Today, the automaker teased images of its first-ever full-on EV.
The Rolls-Royce Spectre is about to enter testing, and the images of the camouflaged model (in prototype version) reveal a coupe-style design that’s far less boxy than the Rolls-Royce cars we’ve always known. The need to optimize aerodynamics for an electric powertrain made that a given, but it’s still a bit jarring to come face to face with a “sleek” Rolls-Royce. Although it must be said, the Spectre is sleek only in relative terms, there’s still a squareness to this EV not seen in the first electric sedans produced by Mercedes-Benz and Audi, for example.
The coupe-style design of the Spectre doesn’t mean Rolls-Royce is positioning it as a replacement for the Wraith, in fact a company spokesperson confirmed to automotive website Motor Authority that this isn’t the case. More likely is that the new model will fill the spot in the lineup vacated by the Phantom Coupe.
Beyond what the images reveal, we know that the Spectre’s foundation is a version of the automaker’s aluminum space-frame architecture first used for the current Phantom. Motor Authority surmises that the vehicle could adopt the BMW Group’s 5th-generation EV technology (built to handle battery capacities of up to 120 kWh, which would mean in the neighborhood of 400 km of range.
This version of the Spectre we’re seeing goes into testing starting just about right away, and while it’s a pre-production version, the final product is likely to hew pretty to it. According to Rolls-Royce CEO Torsten Mueller-Oetvoes, development of the Spectre is almost complete and that the current prototype is already representative of the final production version.
