OpinionTop Gear
Rolls-Royce Spectre Black Badge: hit or miss?
It's the most powerful Rolls-Royce ever built. Does the Spectre Black Badge represent progress, or excess?
Jack Rix: “Perfect silence, bottomless torque, zero vibrations”
You may recall a slightly breathless Ollie Kew calling the Spectre “the best car in the world” when he first drove one back in 2023, and you can see why – this was Rolls-Royce arriving at the place it had been reaching for forever. Perfect silence, bottomless torque, zero vibrations, maximum waft.
The whole Black Badge sub-brand was devised to appeal to younger millionaires, so inevitably it’s a bit gauche. But you don’t have to have one in Quality Street purple, taste and restraint can be applied to the interior too, and if you don’t like the sound of launch control in a Rolls, you might want to check your pulse.
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Sam Burnett: “An alter ego? A Rolls-Royce should just be pure ego”
All a bit new money isn’t it? The problem is no one cares now whether a 93-year-old artisan has lovingly placed every last lithium cell following the traditions of his forebears, so Rolls can’t compete in a whizzy electric age. If you can’t beat them, turn into them is the new motto. Alter ego? A Rolls-Royce should just be pure ego. And a sporty mode button on the steering wheel? I ask you.
These cars have always been less Jekyll and Hyde, more Upstairs, Downstairs. No, what they should have focused on is a lighter walnut burr and quilted leather combo to give the Spectre enough real world range to get to the bottom of the driveway.
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