HOW WE ROLL

Or at least it's how we'd like to. At long last, Rolls-Royce's first electric car, the Spectre, has made it on to Asia's roads, so naturally PRESTIGE was among the first to drive it.

- JON WALL

After teasing us as long ago as 2011 with the notion that a fully electric Rolls-Royce was on the cards, then reinforcing that message five years later by pulling the wraps off the futuristic autonomously driven 103 EX design exercise, the luxury Anglo-German motor manufacturer eventually revealed to the world its first-ever battery-powered production car early in 2023. And despite being dubbed Spectre, a name freighted with all manner of nefarious Bondian connotations, the two-door, four-seat coupe turned out to be neither ghostly nor sinister. On the contrary, it's dramatic and in some ways rather beautiful-and at almost 5.5 metres long and more than 2.9 tonnes in weight, it's also absolutely enormous. Indeed, with its Parthenon-inspired front grille, sweeping fastback roofline and unmistakeably aristocratic countenance, it's one of the most distinctive automobiles on the road.

If we leave aside for one moment the radical substitution in motive power, in many ways the Spectre is the archetypal Rolls-Royce. It's massive, fabulously luxurious in every way imaginable (and some ways possibly not), utterly smooth to drive and ride in, pin-drop silent and likely to be so personalised by their owners that no two cars will ever be identical-most of which I find out when at long last I have the opportunity to get behind the wheel of one of the first right-hand-drive examples to make its way to Asia.