The Great Beyond

Who needs a huge V12 when electric power can bring out the qualities that make a Rolls-Royce a Rolls-Royce?

- Colin Overland

IT IS NO REFLECTION ON THE PERFECTLY decent satellite-navigation in the Spectre that it takes me a while to find the road I am looking for. I could get lost on a merry-go-round. Today I am getting lost in the first production electric Rolls-Royce.

All the nav system's polite but insistent encouragement that I should 'please perform a legal U-turn' and all my apologetic shrugs of 'sorry, not from round here' as I turn around in another driveway are worth it when, close to the end of my day with the luxury sports coupé, I find myself on Trinity Road, which turns out to be very much not where I think it should be.

Changing names a couple of times, to Dry Creek Road and then Oakville Grade Road, it is no distance on paper, 18 kilometres, but for most of that length it is a twisting, turning, rising, falling minor road. Not the sort of road well suited to the typical Rolls limo, but then the Spectre is far from typical. Goodwood's decision to strike out into uncharted territory for its first EV is all quite deliberate and it is working; the pre-orders include many first-time Rolls buyers.

Not that it is unrelated to other Rollers. It uses a version of the same aluminium space-frame shared across the current line-up of Ghost, Phantom, and Cullinan (and not shared with BMWs). It has many familiar cabin elements. The proportions of the body are more or less those of the now departed Phantom Coupé.