If the word out of Goodwood is true, Rolls-Royce owners won’t have shut off their engines so you can hear them [ask for Grey Poupon](<object width=) because they won’t have engines, just blissfully silent electric motors.
That’s right. Rolls Royce, a marque second only to Hummer for being synonymous with conspicuous consumption, wants to go green. Company CEO Tom Purves says he’d like to build an electric version of the Phantom using pretty much the same technology BMW, which owns Rolls, is putting into the Mini EV it recently rolled out.
The funny thing is, an electric Rolls makes a lot of sense.
Think about it. Most Rolls-Royce owners don’t do much more than tool around town, so range isn’t an issue. The cars are built for comfort, not speed, so they don’t need a lot of power. And with cities like London adopting gas-guzzler taxes, an electric Rolls could save owners some serious coin.
"Many of our customers do small mileages exclusively in the city," company CEO Tom Purves told Britain’s Car magazine. "For these customers, an electric Rolls-Royce would be ideal." He goes on to say, "I can imagine a time when city or state authorities may ban cars from towns that exceed a certain level of CO2. We may need an electric car merely to sell in certain parts of the world."
Yeah, but c’mon — an electric Rolls? Isn’t that a sign of the apocalypse? Or at least a little too crunchy for the caviar-and-Champagne set? Purves sees nothing unusual about a Rolls with a cord. "We stand for unmatched refinement and you can’t get a quieter and less intrusive engine than a well-engineered electric motor," he says. "Truly, the loudest noise you would hear would be the tick of the clock."
He doesn’t think building an e-Rolls would be much trouble or take much time. He figures the car could be built at the venerable Rolls factory in Goodwood, England, with technical help from the engineers in Munich working on the Mini-E. A motor, a controller and a big honkin’ battery — how tough could it be? Of course, Rolls isn’t about to ditch its wonderful 12-cylinder engines. The way Purves sees it, customers would want one of each.
Photo by Rolls-Royce.
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