Starting this decade, Rolls-Royce will go electric, and by 2030 the luxury car arm of BMW will become a fully electric motor car brand. In September 2021, Rolls-Royce confirmed that it had commenced testing of the first all-electric Rolls-Royce, Spectre. To ensure that the Rolls Royce Spectre inherits over 100 years of luxury motoring, it will undergo a demanding testing programme, spanning 2.5 million kilometres, simulating on average more than 400 years of use for a Rolls-Royce.

Over the past months, the marque’s test and development engineers have shifted their focus from extreme arctic conditions to a region of the planet where most Rolls owners spend their time, the French Riviera.

The Rolls Royce Spectre electric Super Coupé will be the first all-electric super-luxury motor car with continental touring central to its proposition. The topography and climate of the French Riviera present a combination of the types of conditions that will be demanded from Spectre’s clients, ranging from coastal corniches to faster inland carriageways.

Spectre’s fully electric powertrain utilizes advanced data processing and powerful technologies. Spectre will become the most connected Rolls-Royce, it features 141,200 sender-receiver relations and has more than 1,000 functions and more than 25,000 sub functions. This is around three times more sender-receiver signals than a typical Rolls-Royce.

Rolls-Royce’s hallmark ‘magic carpet ride’ is being remastered for Spectre. Spectre’s high-speed processing capabilities combined with a sophisticated electronic roll stabilisation system uses data from the motor car’s Flagbearer system. The system predictively reads the road surface ahead, and the satellite navigation system alerts Spectre to upcoming corners.

On straight roads, the system can automatically decouple Spectre’s anti-roll bars, allowing each wheel to act independently. This prevents the rocking motion that occurs when one side of a vehicle hits an undulation in the road. This also dramatically improves high-frequency imperfections in ride caused by smaller, more frequent shortcomings in road surface quality.

Spectre’s aluminium architecture is reinforced with steel sections that provide exceptional torsional rigidity. This results in improved structural rigidity by up to 30%. Rolls-Royce has also been achieved this partly by integrating the extremely rigid structure of the battery itself into Spectre’s aluminium spaceframe architecture.

The Rolls Royce Spectre will still be tested for a further one million kilometres. First customer deliveries of Spectre will commence in the fourth quarter of 2023.