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New Rolls-Royce Spectre 2024 review: a peerless EV experience
The electric Rolls-Royce isn’t completely immune to horrible British road surfaces but it still sets the standard for EV elegance and luxury, just as you’d expect
Verdict
UK roads don’t pull apart the Rolls-Royce Spectre’s dynamic qualities, but nor do they give it a free pass for some of the foibles we noted when we drove it abroad. It is beautifully finished and impressively refined, even given the expectations that go with the badge. But it’s not as big inside as its vast dimensions suggest, and the ride quality can be caught out by urban road scars - annoying for a vehicle designed for gliding up to events, rather than crossing continents. Still, there’s enough here of what a Rolls-Royce should be - and anything approaching what you’d call an obvious rival for this car, from Bentley or Range Rover, is still at least a year away.
According to Rolls-Royce, there’s never been a model in the company’s history with the initial level of interest and orders to match the Spectre, the luxury marque’s first electric car. We were impressed enough with the car when we tried it in the United States last year - but now it’s time to see how it stacks up on UK roads.
And this is a potentially significant test, because if we had one gripe about the Rolls-Royce Spectre in California, it was that its suspension set-up never quite managed to make the body feel properly tied down. Britain’s notoriously awful road surfaces might well expose this even further.
But first, a brief recap. The Spectre is an imposing all-electric two-door that measures not far off five and a half metres in length. There’s no denying that it’s colossal, and it looks heavy from some angles, although the subtle metallic-green paintjob of the car tested here does it a few favours in this regard.
Beneath it all sits Rolls’s Architecture of Luxury, accommodating a 255bhp motor at the front and a 483bhp one at the rear, with a total system output of 577bhp and 900Nm of torque. This is a car whose weight is alarmingly close to three tonnes but instant electric shove means that 0-60mph takes less than 4.5 seconds.
The usable battery capacity measures a whopping 102kWh, and Rolls-Royce says the car can travel up to 329 miles between charges - which can then happen at up to 195kW, if you’re unlucky enough to require a refill in a public space (goodness knows who you might have to interact with), instead of getting home to the charging point at your own country estate or lavish townhouse.
Climb aboard through the powered and frankly ludicrously impractical rear-hinged doors and there’s no denying that Rolls has nailed the Spectre’s cabin. Everything feels beautifully made and finished - from the metal surfaces you interact with to the sublime leathers and the wood on the dashboard (other looks are available, of course). There’s plenty of tech, with a sizeable touchscreen and a fully digital instrument panel, but it’s all integrated pretty neatly, so it looks reasonably natural even when it’s positioned beside the analogue clock in the fascia.
Read More www.autoexpress.co.uk/rolls-r...
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