Rolls-Royce To Create First Electric Super Luxury Car
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars is joining electric automobile as it embarks on an ambitious project to create the first electric super luxury car.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, the car marque CEO, Torsten Müller-Ötvös, pledges to bring Rolls-Royce electric car this decade drawing on the manufacture’s history.
“In April 1900, our founding forefather, Charles Rolls, made a prescient prophecy about automotive electrification. Move forward over 120 years to when I made a public promise, on the record, that we would bring the first fully electric RollsRoyce to market within the current decade. And, right now, our company is embarking on an historic undertaking to create the first, super luxury car of its type. This will happen, sooner than many thought possible, through the incredible skills, expertise, vision and dedication of our engineers, designers and specialists at the Home of Rolls-Royce.
“In this ground-breaking endeavour, we are drawing on a remarkable heritage, unique in our industry. Our founders and those who worked alongside them in the marque’s formative years were all important pioneers of electric power, as well as their era’s leading experts in automotive engineering. As we herald a new electric future at Rolls-Royce, I am proud and humbled to share their inspiring stories, which have never been told in one place before, and shine a fresh and fascinating light on our company’s earliest days.”
The marque will introduce an all-electric car between 2020 and 2030 and it will be a pure BEV, not a hybrid of any kind.
The car is expected to be launched only when the time is right, and every element meets Rolls-Royce’s technical, aesthetic and performance standards. The marque’s unique heritage in electric power pre-dates the founding of Rolls-Royce the company itself, and involves many of the principal protagonists whose names are forever associated with it.
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars’ interest in electric cars dated back to the vision of its founding father, Henry Royce who was one of the world’s first electrical engineers. After his apprenticeship with the Great Northern Railway was cut short for family financial reasons, he worked briefly as a toolmaker at Greenwood & Batley in Leeds, where he first developed an interest in electrical power.
In 1881, he joined the Electric Light & Power Generating Company (EL&PG) in Southwark. During this time, he attended evening classes in electrics at the City & Guilds of London Institute, having received only a year of formal schooling as a child. A year later, aged just 19, he moved to the EL&PG’s new subsidiary, the Lancashire Maxim-Weston Electric Co. Ltd, as Chief Electrician, providing street and theatre lighting to the city of Liverpool. But within two years, the company folded, and the famously driven, hardworking Royce struck out on his own.
His new enterprise, F H Royce & Co, initially made small electrical appliances such as doorbells, lamps, fuses and switches. The business thrived, and was soon producing larger, more complex devices including dynamos, electric motors and winches. In 1902, Royce supplied electric motors for Pritchett & Gold, a London-based battery-maker that had diversified into building electric cars.
Though Royce himself never built or owned an electric motor car, he created internal combustion engines that delivered the driving experience we associate with electric propulsion today: effortless torque, silent running and the sensation of one continuous, powerful gear. His technical expertise and pioneering achievements underpin the marque’s historical claim as a world leader in electrification in both luxury and social settings.