So said Charles Stewart Rolls in the year 1900, six years before he'd come to launch the gasoline-fired Rolls Royce Motor Cars concern with Henry Royce. Rolls predicted a future that seems likely to come to pass starting now as the company bearing the two men's famous surnames has just fired the opening salvo in a mission to sell nothing but electrically propelled motorcars by the year 2030.

The virtues of electric propulsion seem especially suited to those claimed by the concern since its inception, only never will these sterling attributes-instant torque and near silent operation-have been more fully realized than they will be here. While the 102EX, Rolls's Phantom-based electric concept car, made the press rounds in 2012, the Spectre entering production late next year incorporates a decade's worth of new technology and investment, and it shows.

To look at the Spectre, however, is to see the unmistakable form of a modern Rolls-Royce coupe. It would have been easy, perhaps easier, to make the first electric offering an SUV, as Mihiar Ayoubi, the company's director of engineering, told us, but it was not the expression of luxury the company was after. Almost 18 feet long and seven feet wide, the four-seat Spectre fastback is an unabashed rich person's express that bows before no one. Riding on a 126-inch wheelbase, it tips the scales at 6559 pounds unladen, with a Brobdingnagian turning circle of almost 42 feet, even with standard four-wheel steering. Environmental efficiency may be the goal, and it may be as claimed the most aerodynamic Roller ever, but there is nothing particularly futuristic, downsized, or less than maximally badass about the Spectre. Not that we would have expected otherwise.

Torque:                                   900 Nm 

Curb Weight:                          2,975 kg

Length x width x height:       5,453mm x 2,080mm x 1,559mm 

Range:                                    320 Miles.

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