Rolls-Royce Spectre II review: Can you perfect perfection?

On the plane to Stockholm, where Rolls-Royce launched the new Series II Spectre, two questions kept cropping up among the assembled motoring writers. 'Didn’t they only launch the original about five minutes ago?' and 'What do you think they could have changed?'.

The answer to the first question is easy. It may not feel like it but it’s actually three years since the Spectre — Rolls-Royce’s first ever electric model — first hit the road.

And the second answer? Most of the conjecture was pretty jokey: 'They’ll have re-designed the wing mirrors’, and, ‘different colour options for the go-faster stripes’ were favourites. Both guesses proved wrong because at first glance the you'd think that nothing has changed at all.

That's not a bad thing and actually shows admirable restraint since the original was, and is, absolutely wonderful. So little has changed, in fact, that I did toy with the idea of simply re-running my review of OG Spectre from October 2023 to see if anybody would notice.

I came to the conclusion that they probably wouldn’t, but that nor could I short-change anyone by not actually, you know, doing my job. So here we are: Spectre II: what has changed?

So, the wing mirrors are unchanged, as is the go-faster stripe — or ‘Coachline’, as Rolls-Royce call it. The latter is still, rather magnificently, painted on by hand by the man with the steadiest hands in the automotive industry. The answer to the upmarket game of 'spot the difference' is in the wheels: new 23-inch, forged steel rims and very smart they look too, though slightly scary.

There are cosmetic changes in the cabin too, where, a snazzy new clock is now available — and the revamped dashboard dazzles even so than it did before.

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There are new fabrics, the most exotic of which is called ‘Duality Twill’, a rayon fabric made from bamboo that was apparently inspired by Le Jardin des Méditerranées on the Côte d’Azur, next door to Sir Henry Royce’s former winter home, Villa Mimosa. Naturally, you can order this in green to make sure your friends ask you about it.

It's easy for non-Rolls-Royce customers to wonder what difference such things make; but that's a mistake no actual Rolls owner would make. Customisation is absolutely ingrained in the Rolls-Royce identity right now: there’s no such thing as a ‘standard model’, and there hasn’t been for years. If you just want a car, parent group BMW have plenty of other things they’ll sell you. If you want an exquisite expression of your personality, then you’ll want to head to Goodwood — or New York, or Shanghai, or one of the other global design hubs — and deck your Roller out exactly as you want it, whether it's all in black, covered in diamonds, or in two-tone purple and yellow, like a bowl of rhubarb and custard.

The choice really is the point, the difference that shows off Rolls's craftsmanship, and which also happens to push the average price of a Rolls-Royce out to the half-a-million-pounds mark. For a company used to measuring its profit in the billions, that is an important consideration.

You don’t make money like that without giving your customers what they want — and it turns out that in the case of the Spectre, what they want is to actually drive the car. That might sound silly, but the superyacht-like Phantom is one you buy to be chauffeur-driven in, and the huge-selling Cullinan (more than 3,000 were delivered in 2025) is the family Rolls. Spectres are being driven 4,000 miles a year, and usually with the owner alone — and thus the speed and the practicalities have been improved.

The range is 18% better (you'll get almost 400 miles from a full charge now), while charging is 14% quicker, there's 10% more torque from the electric motors in standard spec, and if you go for the sportier Black Badge spec, the car is substantially quicker still. There’s 500kW of power through ‘Infinity Mode’ and up to 1100Nm torque in ‘Spirited Mode’. If those numbers mean nothing to you, then ‘double what you’d get in a Porsche Macan’ will cover it.

The bottom line then? Rolls-Royce have made some nice upgrades to what was already a way-beyond-nice car. Think of it as a beautiful house that you loved before, but which has now been rewired and given a new roof. These are not things you'd immediately notice, but when living with them, they can make a difference. As Royce himself once said, ‘Small things make perfection, but perfection is no small thing’.

Is it a bit cheeky of them to call it ‘Spectre Series II’, rather than just quietly delivering the new bits? Probably, but then again, it gave them a chance to make a thing of it, put on an event in a swish Swedish hotel, and get everyone talking about their sole electric model once more. Job done.

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