Today, I saw the new Rolls Royce Spectre for the first time. It struck me that EV adoption has made for new opportunities in car design.
It seems we’re in the EV age of battery barge styling. I mean, has all of this torque caused legacy automakers to forget about aero and efficiency?
Of course, sparing luxury has never been the hallmark of some luxury brands. The starkest contrast of all would probably be the Hummer EV next to an Aptera. It has a coefficient of drag that is over .5. Thats 4 times the drag! A battery barge for sure.
Many in the industry look for improvement in battery technology rather than innovating actual efficiency in the way that companies like Rimac or Aptera have. Ford’s CEO seems to think that big internal combustion haulers will never be obsolete. Has he seen what Tesla has been working on?
Now that I’m thinking about big inefficient vehicles, I’ll share my most recent brush with an SUV idiot. It was in a grocery store parking lot. I returned to my sedan to see that a Cadillac Escalade was touching my bumper. Luckily, it was touching a portion of flexible plastic. There appeared to be only minor scratches to the actual paint, which is the cost of doing business in parking lots these days. I didn’t want to actually meet the a-hole now happily gathering groceries in Costco.
So, what do you think of the new Rolls Royce Spectre? Personally, I’d rather have a few Teslas for the price tag of nearly one half of a million dollars. I am by no means the target customer, but I do appreciate the extravagance of it.
So many luxury cars fall by the wayside with worn-out engines and rotten leather. My mind keeps turning back to the Aptera goal of producing a vehicle that is multi-generational and dependable. Then again, I don’t live in that world where you always get what you want, and you spare no expense.
Thanks for the post!