Rolls-Royce Spectre Black Badge (2025 – ) Electric review

If you have to ask you can’t afford it and all that, Black Badge taking the already outrageously expensive Spectre as its base and going from there. Built to satisfy Rolls-Royce’s most demanding clients (it doesn’t have ‘customers’), these owners actually had a say in how the Black Badge was developed, a select few driving early versions as part of what is described as a clandestine fleet of vehicles that gathered driving data and more to understand how Spectre drivers actually use their cars. None of them will be troubled by anything so vulgar as cost of purchase, ownership, charging or anything else.

While electric motors are mechanically simpler than the petrol-fuelled works of engineering art that powered traditional Rolls-Royces the Spectre remains a phenomenally complicated car. Not that this need trouble you. You’ll have both other cars to drive and people to sort out any issues if anything does come up.

It’s massive, the visibility at junctions is shockingly bad and the sense of superiority it encourages in the driver probably isn’t healthy. But the Spectre is there to look after you and the many and varied safety systems tend to intervene with the electronic equivalent of a quiet cough from your butler, rather than the screaming and shouting of similar systems in ‘normal’ cars. The width of the Black Badge does keep the lane-keeping busy, mind, especially on the narrow British B-roads we tested it on.

If the vault-like rear-hinged door seems a stretch away when you first sink into the armchair of a driving seat fear not – a tap of the brake pedal has it swinging shut with no need to exert yourself by reaching for it. And from this moment on you are sealed in your cocoon of wealth, leather and luxury, the tribulations of the outside world seemingly remote and inconsequential. Star-like lights prickle the dash, doors and roof, the expensive waft of leather fills your senses and the driving experience is every bit as soothing. While the steering is apparently heavier than the regular Spectre it’s still fingertip light, yet incredibly precise with it. Which is some feat of engineering. Just occasionally a road imperfection may thump through, but for the most part the Spectre seems to levitate over the road, the silent electric power the perfect match.

It’s pointless talking features on the Spectre Black Badge because each will be built to the particular tastes (or, potentially, otherwise) of their owners. The one we drove had an interior so purple the ghost of Prince himself would yelp in approval, this vibrant leather set against carbon fibre trim inlayed with fine strands of decorative metal in lacquer so clear it appeared liquid. Other Rolls-Royces may have been more obvious in shared switches and controls supplied by the brand’s BMW owners but these seem to have been all but purged for the Spectre, the switchgear an elegant combination of traditional knobs and dials controlling the sophisticated electronics behind. Your only hint of BMW is in the infotainment, but that’s no bad thing because it’s among the best in the business.

Rolls-Royce and electric motors were a marriage made in heaven, given the huge reserves of power and utter silence with which they are delivered to the road. Even in its standard setting the Spectre shrugs off its size and weight with contemptuous ease – select ‘Infinity’ and power increases to 659 horsepower over the 584 horsepower of the standard Spectre while a Spirited Mode apparently inspired by the ‘emergency power’ setting on the Rolls-Royce Merlin engines used in Battle of Britain Spitfires unleashes yet more go should you need to make a really fast getaway. All of which is a bit silly. But delivered with such deadpan earnestness you can’t help but be swept away. You would if you could. And those that can are in for a treat.