Rolls-Royce has clocked up 2,000,000km worth of testing of its first-ever battery-electric vehicle, the Spectre, as the company gets ready for first customer deliveries in the fourth quarter of this year.
Although these photos look more like glamour shots than rigorous testing, the company says it is aiming to put the Spectre through a testing program totalling 2.5 million kilometres to work out any kinks with the high-voltage components and the battery pack in particularly tough conditions.
South Africa has played a key role in the testing phase, with the Northern Cape’s Augrabies region and the French Corner in the Western Cape winelands providing temperatures upward of 50 degrees that are perfect for extreme temperature testing.
Late last year, Rolls-Royce took the Spectre up to Sweden’s Arctic Circle for some extreme cold weather testing, something that is particularly tough for batteries and electrical systems.
As a reminder, the Rolls-Royce Spectre is set to produce at least 430kW/900Nm from a dual electric motor setup, with power supplied by an unconfirmed battery capacity, although we know it weighs around 700kg and offers a claimed range of 520km on the WLTP test cycle. Rolls-Royce director of engineering, Mihiar Ayoubi, said:
“The reason for our extraordinary and restless global testing process is simple: there has never been a motor car like the Spectre before. Spectre represents not just a new paradigm in our technology, but the entire future direction of our brand.”
