Rolls-Royce Motor Cars announced that on-road testing of its first fully electric motor car is imminent. First deliveries of the car are slated for the fourth quarter of 2023.

Rolls-Royce Motor Cars CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös, said that the demanding testing program will cover 2.5 million kilometers—a simulation of more than 400 years of use for a Rolls-Royce, on average—and will travel to all four corners of the world to push this new motor car to the limit.

In 2017, we debuted Phantom, and with it the marque’s proprietary aluminium architecture: a scalable and flexible spaceframe that would underpin all forthcoming Rolls-Royce motor cars. This unique technology—developed for Rolls-Royce by Rolls-Royce and reserved for the marque’s exclusive use—was created to form the foundation of not just different internal combustion engine models, as it now does with Cullinan and Ghost, but models with completely different powertrains.

To this end, our forthcoming electric car benefits from the Rolls-Royce architecture and therefore the extraordinary experience of a Rolls-Royce on the road. Free of any group platform sharing strategy, we were able to integrate our plans for an electric powertrain into the architecture’s initial design and ensure that this extraordinary new product meets the extremely high expectations of our clients.

—Torsten Müller-Ötvös

Rolls-Royce is naming the EV “Spectre”.

This name perfectly matches the extraordinary Rolls-Royce that we are announcing today—a motor car that makes its presence felt before disappearing into a world inaccessible to all but the very few. As a quintessentially British brand, we have selected the British spelling, however the meaning is universal.

—Torsten Müller-Ötvös