At The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering, which is part the Monterey Car Week 2024 in California this month, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars will present the Spectre Semaphore, a Bespoke one-of-one commission by a customer.
This highly Bespoke expression of the fully electric Spectre captures the bold new codes of luxury being established by the marque’s confident, youthful client base. The car takes its name from the unique colour – Bespoke Semaphore Yellow – specially created for the exterior coachwork.
This solid finish is further elevated with a unique artwork on the bonnet, inspired by the informal elegance of coastal California. Named ‘Marbled Paint Spill’, the graphic is an abstract tribute to the Golden State and its diverse environment. From the sunshine of Southern California to the eastern silver mountain tops, the Bespoke artisans have brought this inspiration to reality.
To create this motif, Rolls-Royce craftspeople applied silver lacquer and multiple layers of clearcoat for a seamless finish. The bonnet alone is the product of over 160 hours of design, development and production.
The bright yellow colourway extends into the car’s interior. A combination of Bespoke Lemon Yellow and Citrine Yellow is used across the seats, Starlight doors and above the instrument panel. It blends into the contrasting Grace White and Slate Grey hues with Lemon Yellow stitching. The marque’s designers also leveraged the digital Bespoke potential offered by the SPIRIT operating system by complementing the dials to the motor car’s yellow colourway.
The Spectre Semaphore maximises the interior suite’s contemporary design with a clean, high-polish Bespoke painted wood set. Coloured to match the grey material accents, the Cashmere Grey paint is infused with silver mica flakes, which creates a vivacious sparkle under direct light.
Rolls-Royce doesn’t go into great detail about the powertrain but highlights the numbers that customers will be interested in. The electric powertrain has 2 motors which, in performance terms, deliver the equivalent to an internal combustion engine of 430 kW (584 ps) with 900 Nm of torque. This can send the Spectre from 0 – 100 km/h in a claimed 4.5 seconds.
Charging a fully empty battery to 100% with AC 22 kW power supply will take 5.5 hours. It is possible to recharge even with a 9.6 kW single-phase outlet but that will probably take ‘forever’. Most owners are likely to have a dedicated charging point in their homes which would likely be 22 kW.
With a 195 kW DC fast-charger, the time is said to be 34 minutes from 10% – 80%. If in a hurry, every 9 minutes of charging can provide 100 kms of range.
Even before the Spectre was launched, selected customers had an opportunity to know about it and perhaps even see the pre-production units. In fact, Rolls-Royce revealed that it got orders from the time it announced that it was working on an electric model in 2021.
In Malaysia, Rolls-Royce Kuala Lumpur says the Spectre has a base price of RM2 million. Until the end of 2025, it can be sold without any taxes imposed as fully electric vehicles can be imported and sold duty-free throughout Malaysia, not just Langkawi and Labuan.
By the time of its launch in October 2022, the order book for the Spectre was full for at least 3 years which meant that there would be a waiting period up to 2025. So if you are lucky, you might just be able to get one duty-free in time.