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The all-electric Rolls-Royce Spectre has completed its cold weather testing in Sweden and has now entered its next phase in the French Riviera.
The Spectre’s testing programme covers 2.5 million kilometres, simulating on average more than 400 years of use for a Rolls-Royce.
Rolls-Royce says the Spectre is designed for continental touring and the French Riviera features ideal roads for the car’s potential buyers.
A total of 625,000 kilometres will be driven on and around the French Côte d’Azur. The first half will be at the historic Autodrome de Miramas proving ground, once a circuit that played host to the 1926 Grand Prix, the site is now a state-of-the-art test and development facility, incorporating more than 60 kilometres of closed routes and 20 test track environments. These include handling circuits and a banked 3.1 mile three-lane high-speed bowl, enabling the Spectre to be tested at continuous high speeds.
The second phase of testing in the region occurs in the countryside surrounding the Autodrome de Miramas.
The Spectre has ‘decentralised intelligence’ with data processing featuring 141,200 sender-receiver relations, more than 1,000 functions and more than 25,000 sub functions. This is around three times more sender-receiver signals than a typical Rolls-Royce. All this means that the car’s reaction time is much faster and more detailed.
A new suspension technology has been approved that ensures that the Spectre delivers Rolls-Royce’s traditional standards of ride quality.
Using the Spectre’s high-speed processing capabilities, an electronic roll stabilisation system uses data from the car’s Flagbearer system, which reads the road surface ahead, and satellite navigation system, which alerts the Spectre to upcoming corners.
Once a corner is confirmed as imminent by satellite navigation data and the Flagbearer system, the suspension dampers stiffen and the four-wheel steering system prepares for activation. Under cornering, more than 18 sensors are monitored, and steering, braking, power delivery and suspension parameters are adjusted accordingly so that the Spectre remains stable.
The car’s all-aluminium spaceframe architecture creates the most rigid body in the brand’s history, representing a 30% improvement over all existing Rolls-Royce cars, has also been achieved by integrating the rigid structure of the battery itself into the Spectre’s aluminium spaceframe architecture.
The Spectre is expected to have a drag coefficient (cd) of just 0.25, making it the most aerodynamic Rolls-Royce ever created.
The Spectre’s development is now approximately 40% complete; it’s due to be tested for another million kilometres. First customer deliveries of the Spectre will commence in the fourth quarter of 2023.
By 2030 Rolls-Royce will be a fully electric car brand.
