The Best Rolls Royce Ever Made!? Spectre FIRST DRIVE

this is perhaps the most highly anticipated and important car that Rolls-Royce has ever created for over a hundred years this luxury defining brand has set the Benchmark for opulence and refinement underpinned in the last decade by a category defining V12 power unit that propelled its cars with effortless energy that is until today so great to see you again yeah perfect but normally here in sunny Napa Valley with a real driving car very very exciting exactly so I know we've done the in-depth yeah walk and talk and we're going to put a link in the description below if you want to see the in-depth tour but I thought before we get on the road it would be good to introduce these guys to like a Top Line overview of why the car is so special to Rolls-Royce yeah for sure I mean first and foremost as you said it's a Rolls-Royce and that was what really drove us is that Specter should be a Rolls-Royce first and secondly of course an electric car so from your time talking with clients and I mean I know you've been like researching it for years and getting feedback what are the main sort of key points that you've received from clients that they're like listen what we really enjoy about Rolls-Royce experience has been this yeah can you try and engineer it into Specter yeah I think firstly the design character when clients come and they see the car so many say you know it's unmistakably Rolls-Royce we've got the grill the pantheon Grill the spirit of ecstasy the proportions you know the three key lines that you see on All Rolls royces we've retained all of that secondly the driving character you know and the engineering team have worked tirelessly to make sure that it accelerates like a Rolls-Royce we still have that waftability we don't have that you know punch in the back that maybe people associate with an electric car sure it is it's designed to drive and feel like a Rolls-Royce and of course that's so harmonious with everything that we've tried to do with the V12 you know to make it as silent as possible as effortless to drive as possible so we've got Charles Rose's prophecy about how well suited the electric Drive is to Rolls-Royce and 123 years later here we are isn't that wild yeah he was literally talking about and you mentioned charging networks yeah it's unbelievable and I think not only for me but for the team to have that as a you know a beacon of okay this is actually what the brand has been striving for yeah it's really special to be part of the team that have fulfilled that fantastic well look I've been waiting a long time for this so I'll catch up with you when I get back but now we've basically got the entire day inspector to find out what it's all about and one of the very first so enjoy it I'm honored about so thank you thank you so much and congratulations to see you outside of a studio is yeah I know right yeah thank you so much enjoy it so Rolls-Royce don't exactly launch a new car every year in fact if you look at the lifespan of phantom 7 for example that was around for 14 years before Phantom 8 came around now I set that context because not only do roles not launch new cars very often but new product categories that is an entirely different ball game and that's exactly what we're in today welcome to the all-new 100 electric Rolls Royce Specter as a passion of petrol head there aren't too many electrified cars that get me excited but I can't think of a brand better suited to electrification than Rolls-Royce today we're going to find out if the expectations meet with reality for me why this is a Monumental moment is because if there was ever a brand in the entirety of the automotive world that was conducive to going electric it's this right here Rolls-Royce think about what they've been trying to achieve over the last 100 years the very essence of their DNA is refinement luxury effortlessness as it were and it's all about reducing any sort of stress or vibration or ambient noise everything that electrification stands for and helps with and today we are in the first culmination of roles's vision as to what a pure EV Rolls-Royce experience is all about [Music] now unlike most car brands I've actually sat through two technical presentations over the last 24 hours with Rolls-Royce to sort of get a fundamental Top Line understanding of what this car is all about and not once have they mentioned horsepower torque figures naught to 60 times it's because Rolls-Royce is exactly that that Rolls-Royce there's a reason why other luxury segments in other industries use Rolls-Royce as The Benchmark to convey their standards we are the Rolls-Royce of hotels with our the Rolls-Royce of this experience all that experience these guys are the benchmarks and they just so happen to have four wheels and today we are going to see how they've managed to evolve the distillation of driving luxury to an entirely different level by taking out the iconic V12 and putting in 100 EV drivetrain yo this really is the stuff that you cannot Google you can check out all the facts and stats about the torsional rigidity of the chassis and all of that jazz but really Rolls Royce for me is the intangible the invisible emotions that you feel that is difficult to convey so bear with me while I talk about how this thing feels like you are on a maglev form of magical transport I am not kidding from zero to around about 16 miles an hour I feel is it sort of Sweet Spot window what I mean by that is the rolling resistance the complete lack of friction the effortless energy it's like this malleable ball of torque but the difference with this car and other cars is that while under most cars under your right foot on the accelerator you feel this tangible ball of torque ready to go this is like having a vast magnetic energy in front of you that is drawing the car frictionlessly along the road in fact along the road is almost a disservice because there are bumps that I'm seeing with my eyes that are quite literally not being conveyed through the suspension itself that in part is due to the fact that this has the largest and most sophisticated air ride system on any car ever made it's just a totally different ball game the suppliers which Rolls-Royce partnered with came to the table at the early development stages of this car with the very best they had to offer and then Rolls-Royce went that's nice now we can start work on them they literally said that's not good enough the best components in the world are not suitable for the driving experience that we are trying to achieve to take things to the next level foreign I am actually enjoying the drive now this car is heavy a rolls royces for example when I mentioned earlier that they Benchmark themselves in a completely different world they are proud to tell you that they added in an additional 100 kilograms of sound deadening just to make this car even quieter I've never spoken to a brand who is proud of the weight that they've added to their cars but as I mentioned roles do things entirely differently but why this thing drives so well there's incredible amounts of algorithms and processing that's going on within their proprietary suspension and chassis system but of course with it being an EV that ultra dense battery pack is sat super low so the center of gravity just sort of helps disguise the physics of the size of this car that's the other thing that is very difficult to convey on camera is the presence of Specter and then it's scale this is the spiritual successor to the Phantom Coupe which means it's by and large a pretty big car it's two meters wide and yet the way it handles very Advanced rear wheel steering as I mentioned massive low center of gravity but the air ride suspension despite the fact that it does this witchcraft job of ironing out the creases bumps and undulations in the road ultimately the very fancy Tech that sits behind the anti-roll architecture of the car just keeps it incredibly level now a very subtle detail which you probably didn't expect me to talk about is the diameter of the steering wheel both in circumference and thickness of the wheel itself now if you look at Phantom 8 what speaks volumes as to the ethos of that car is the diameter of the steering wheel itself as a circumference it's it's larger than most cars it's almost akin to sort of sailing a ship whereas in this this is probably the I guess thickest steering wheel that I felt in a Rolls-Royce and weirdly subconsciously when you hold it it suggests something it suggests that it is more of a driver's car than perhaps other cars that they have made historically and then when you tie all of these components together and you throw it into a tight corner on this hot asphalt all of a sudden you're thinking yes it would be fantastic for chauffeuring guests around but when the car's empty there's also the ability and the perhaps a sort of 15 20 DNA which has a sort of Spirited driving character to it after all you do have a massive amount of power underfoot and a vast amount of torque [Music] and then there's the break regen now in most electric cars the regenerative braking which recuperates some lost energy through braking is sort of Applied automatically when you lift off the throttle now in this Rolls-Royce being Rolls-Royce have come up with two settings they have a setting where regen is on and they have a setting where you could on this stalk here press this B button and then regen is off the reason for that is due to customer feedback and ultimately a lot of research and the reason for that is clients have fed back to Rolls-Royce that one of their favorite characteristics of driving a Rolls-Royce is actually more akin to sailing a Rolls-Royce now being in the very fortunate position of driving a few of their cars over the years I know exactly what they mean when you lift off the throttle in most cars they generally slow down fairly quickly it's a relatively uneventful occasion just effectively switching off the engine but in a Rolls-Royce it has this incredible ability of maintaining the vast momentum that is built up in its weight and it just maintains this incredible waft this flow this sailing motion and then you sort of build up a technique of what it's like to drive a rolls and that involves Feathering the throttle very lightly once it's found its movement and you just sort of sail it along the road now of course that would be impossible with brake regen because as soon as you lift off it would therefore slow down so rolls is engineered in the ability to turn it off and turn it on should you wish to sail your Specter down the road [Music] now then I know you what you're all thinking what's the range what is the range of this electric car now it's a big electric car so you'd be forgiven for thinking that it might have a superior amount of range actually I don't think it does it's just over 300 miles and I'll be interested to see how the comment section reacts at this point so yes just over 300 miles might not sound that much but rolls is saying that based on how the majority of people use their roles which is going from home to the town or being chauffeured and doing relatively by and large shorter Journeys they think that 300 miles is going to be acceptable for the majority of use cases I'm not a Rolls-Royce owner so I'm not positioned to tell you that but I probably would have expected it based on its size to have perhaps add a little bit more range thank you now then you would be forgiven for thinking that the ambient noise that you're hearing right now is Tire sound or road noise or external wind noise the chances are it's probably the air conditioning listen to that that's how quiet this car is the air conditioning Breeze is louder than the Ambient sound of the entire car it is ridiculous I actually drove this car for the first five feet and stopped because it's the most unique sensory experience from a luxury Automotive product that I found in the last decade I'm sure a good proportion of you have probably experienced the sound isolation of noise canceling headphones imagine when you step in to Specter the automated door closes the soft clothes almost creates this private vacuum that isolates you away from the rest of the world and it feels like you're existing in a mobile set of giant airpods that is what the serenity of this car is truly like it's a really strange feeling at first but after a few miles you wouldn't want to experience anything else I would honestly say the Tranquility in here probably makes an S-Class feel like a Ford Mondeo and I'm not exaggerating it's quite a remarkable and at first strange thing but in terms of ultra and I mean Ultra refinement Luxury effortlessness this is definitely unequivocally the new Benchmark of Automotive luxury [Music] foreign offer a chauffeur training service because a lot of their cars are used throughout the world for some of the best hotels and clients Etc to have a chauffeur-driven experience and one of the tests that they give to their chauffeurs is something called the champagne test and the idea is that the chauffeur should be able to accelerate and break in a fashion that would otherwise not upset the fluid within one's champagne flute as part of that the profiling of how they feather and blend in the talk delivery has been really important because as we all know now that one of the benefits of an electric drivetrain is the instantaneous power delivery until there's a set of guests in the back sipping on a fine wine so what roles have done is profiled the way that the talk is delivered early on during throttle application now the only way of really explaining this is you don't actually feel much of the power of the car unless you depress three quarters of it first that is of course from slower speeds after that I mean it pulls hard think of it as like a sort of like a yacht finding its plane it sort of builds and then begins to almost settle in on its own Mass it's really interesting that despite the fact that they could have made it Ultra responsive and that would actually have helped with disguising its weight even more they haven't done that they've purposely dialed it back blended it in and it is the smoothest way of leaving from stationery of anything you'll ever experience right now I've been singing this thing as Praises I've been in it all day and I'm genuinely trying to think what I don't like about it the only thing this is kind of weird because it's fundamentally why it exists the only thing is perhaps the charging infrastructure based on what country you're in and the potential range now you're not gonna miss the V12 for the range they probably have a similar range but you know Splash and Dash with a petrol car you're just there for five minutes and gone in this unless you're charging at home or at work which to be honest is where the majority of Rolls-Royce clients will probably end up charging you're going to have the same experience in this as you are a Tesla potentially on a rainy Petrol Station 4 Court in Manchester so it might not always lend itself to the most luxurious experience at all times however I have a funny feeling that most roles owners environments they're probably not used like most normal cars so the majority of the time it's probably not going to be an issue but I still think subconsciously this range anxiety thing is still there to a degree it's not saying that I don't like it about it because why this is the best Rolls-Royce ever made is because of the electrification outside of that genuinely I don't really have a great deal of things that I don't like about it it's the best rolls-roy's ever made what more you want to say [Music] welcome back debrief how was it de brief just fabulous I think it's most defining characteristic from a driving point of view yeah it almost feels like a maglev car it's so frictionless yeah I mean the way that it builds momentum down a road is unbelievable yeah it's amazing it's Rolls-Royce died up to 11. it really is it's still got that character but we've just turned it up a notch which is yeah truly incredible given the how well the B12 is yeah served us for so long and continues to when those soft closed doors sort of vacuum shut I liken it to the equivalent of like putting airpods in yeah it's like you're in your own private vacuum it just isolates the whole world but the way that it gathers momentum it's it's the most frictionless thing I've ever experienced actually yeah and it's you know we spoke earlier almost instead of being pushed in the back you've got this invisible hand which is gently gliding you forwards yes it's it's phenomenal so effortless isn't it yeah it really is it's brilliant yeah we were speaking last night what was your feedback from clients on the use case when it comes to charging them exactly we did I mean a huge amount of research with our clients to understand their thoughts which I think is you know very different to perhaps what a lot of people think when they think about charging an EV sure and clients told us actually it's great that we can charge at home it's great that now I don't need to go and refuel my Rolls-Royce yes I can plug it in when I get home and every morning I'll wake up and I've got 100 charge and of course on longer trips of course capable of Rapid charging 10 to 80 percent in in 34 minutes if you've got a powerful enough charger so by the time you've had a coffee and yes and relax you're good to go again and I suppose if you have driven 300 miles actually a Stop's okay yeah of course yeah yeah you you would stop anyway and yes the EV powertrain very much suits how our clients use the Rolls-Royce of course they inform us about how much they drive which is generally not not that much as I say with such a large range you're it's perfect for for a Rolls-Royce for our clients how does it feel to design the best Rolls-Royce ever made I really think it feels like that no no it really feels like the ultimate distillation of what Rolls Royce stands for is this is the embodiment of that yeah I think it's fabulous you know to play a small part in the work of our designers our Engineers our Crafts People you know all the team at Goodwood yeah everyone has been willing this car into reality you know and to be a part of that is yeah it's an honest congratulations to the whole team thank you it's a truly special thing and if this is the beginning of the next chapter of Rolls Royce yeah I think you're ahead of the curve so yeah well done forward to everyone involved it's just uh spectacular thing [Music]

Channel: Mr JWW

Views: 674,680

Keywords: MrJWW, JWW, Rolls Royce

Id: hx1v0dY0e2o

Length: 20min 46sec (1246 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 03 2023