Rolls-Royce EV finishes 2.5m km test

Rolls-Royce has concluded a 2.5-million-kilometre testing programme of its electric Spectre.

It finished more than 50,000 hours of testing, which included temperature extremes of minus 40°C to plus 50°C, with Lifestyle Analysis testing in the marque’s home market.

“Spectre is the Rolls-Royce that changes everything,” says Rolls-Royce Motor Cars chief executive Torsten Müller-Ötvös.

“It symbolises not only the marque’s technological leadership of the super-luxury sector, but that a bold electric future, first prophesised in 1900 by our founder, Charles Rolls, is now upon us.

“To attain its final, perfect form, Spectre has passed through our engineers’ ‘finishing school’ – and in so doing, completed the most demanding testing regime in our brand’s history, spanning 2.5 million kilometres and every conceivable extreme of temperature, weather, road type and surface condition.”

Lifestyle Analysis testing applies a detailed knowledge of clients’ tastes, habits and requirements.

Müller-Ötvös says it’s a highlight of his professional life to have developed the Rolls-Royce Spectre.

Each of Spectre’s 141,200 digital sender-receiver relations and 25,000 performance-related functions has been sorted by Rolls-Royce engineers, resulting in thousands of iterative improvements in everything from Spectre’s acoustic performance, composure under cornering and steering precision to its charge time, electric range (about 520km WLTP) and torque delivery.

After testing the power-assisted doors on an exceptionally steep hill – replicating steep driveways common to the hills of Los Angeles, California – engineers added gyroscopic and G-force sensors to ensure that doors open and close at the same effortless speed, regardless of longitudinal or transverse parking angles.

Additionally, one corner was used so frequently to test the steering precision of Spectre near Goodwood, West Sussex, it has been named ‘Spectre Corner.’

Client deliveries are due to start in the fourth quarter of this year.