Most Rolls-Royce drivers have four cars or more: this is a car for leisure. They drive their Rolls-Royces perhaps 3,000 miles a year: I would never do that. I would treat it like any other car. Lawrence of Arabia had nine armoured Rolls-Royce Silver Ghosts for his campaign in Arabia. I would go to the supermarket in it, muddy the doors, let brambles scratch it. Before I drove Rolls-Royces I didn’t like them because I didn’t like the people who drove them. Now the fact they drive them is the only thing I like about them.
It is insanely quiet, as Royce predicted, though I could not hear my heartbeat, as a male reviewer insisted he did
The Spectre is Rolls-Royce’s first fully electric car: it will make no cars with combustion engines after 2030 so if you want a petrol Ghost – the purist’s Rolls-Royce – order it now. The Spectre is a glorious thing: long and sinuous, and certain of itself. Cars are made to mirror: drive a Spectre, and you act like one. I am more confident than usual. It’s owned by BMW who know how to treat it, but they are made in West Sussex.
Mr Rolls was an engineer. Mr Royce was in marketing. It’s like a Cole Porter song, or light opera. Purists call their cars Rolls, a small taunt at a man who’s dead. Rolls has been dead almost a century, but he dreamed of the first electric car. He didn’t want to make cars with combustion engines: he always knew an electric car would be quieter. And he longed for quiet. He just had no choice.
I am not allowed to drive the Spectre out of Kilburn. I would have panicked in any case: Hangar Lane is a place of dread for this column, and I once parked a Ferrari across it like a curse. But because there are only three Spectres on British roads that day and because the reviewer’s first experience of the Spectre cannot be driving along the A406, I am driven to a Berkshire golfing hotel. Not that I would have minded: I like watching these cars meet real life. People look pleased to see it, as they would have been pleased to see the late Queen. It has similar energy: an object like this is a curiosity. I am allowed to drive it from the golf hotel to the Newt Hotel in Somerset 100 miles away. I park it amid cows, who ignore it.
It’s huge but it doesn’t feel huge: not like the flagship Phantom, a half a million pound car that feels like it costs more. I couldn’t drive the Phantom on the hairpin bends of the South of France – that sounds as if the Phantom was a character in Rebecca – but I could probably have handled it in Texas. The Phantom is a car to be driven in: it’s too big for me, though it does have an art gallery on the dash. All Rolls-Royces are bespoke.
I can handle the Spectre: it’s a two-door coupé with four seats. It is insanely quiet, as Rolls predicted, though I could not hear my heartbeat, as a male reviewer insisted he did. Its range is 329 miles – for once I believe automobile marketing literature – and when I charge it at a Shell garage it looks odd, like an elephant buying socks. It is the most beautiful Rolls-Royce I have driven. It’s hard to write about the sinuousness of leather or the gloss on wood. Rolls-Royces are made by obsessives. That is clear. People who say the British don’t know anything about the decorative arts don’t look at our cars. It is powerful and it is obedient: if you punch the Spirit of Ecstasy, it will recede into the bonnet. People stay out of its way: it weighs three tonnes. I wonder if fellow drivers understand Rolls-Royces better than their drivers. Because it is not the finish on a Rolls-Royce that obsesses me, even if taking off your socks and having your feet meet an inch of lambswool is a strange experience. It’s that power. Lawrence knew it. Perhaps that is why wealthy people buy one after the other: there is no better metaphor for the condition of being rich. The car expresses an unconscious savagery. I battle a camper van when the A303 goes into a single lane. I put my foot down and I almost hit the central curb. The Spectre rescues me, but still passes what the company calls the champagne test: would a passenger spill their drink? Lord knows what the camper van thought.
So, this is a car of dreams, again: competitors will be eating their fists. The Rolls-Royce has lost nothing by becoming electric: quite the contrary, for what does an English duke want with the needy throb of petrol? Poor Elon Musk!
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