The Fast Lane
What’s New at Rolls-Royce: Spectre Series II and the Rise of the Coachbuild Collection.
By Lily Dougherty
Rolls-Royce is giving its all-electric Spectre a refresh, and the updates aren’t just cosmetic. The Spectre Series II, along with its more evening-appropriate Black Badge sibling, arrive with more range, faster charging, more power, and an expanded menu of the hand-crafted personalization Rolls-Royce clients expect, with first deliveries slated for late 2026 and production ramping up into 2027.
Since it debuted in 2022, the Spectre has become one of the most important cars in the marque’s modern lineup—a two-door “super coupe” praised for its sweeping fastback silhouette and the hush of its ride, and a true sales success, landing as Rolls-Royce’s second best-selling model globally in 2025. Series II is engineers at Goodwood’s answer to a simple question of how to improve something that’s already resonating with clients.
Range is the leader in the list of changes. Rolls-Royce says re-engineered battery cell technology boosts the Spectre’s EPA-estimated range by 16 percent, to 308 miles—enough to erase one of the few practical complaints with the original. Just as important for American owners, the car is switching to the NACS charging standard, opening it up to a much wider network of fast chargers and cutting charging times by roughly 14 percent. Performance gets a boost too. The standard Spectre Series II now produces 593 horsepower and 749 lb-ft of torque. The Black Badge version is Rolls-Royce’s self-described “alter ego” trim, and remains the most powerful car the brand has ever built, with 670 horsepower available in Infinity Mode and up to 811 lb-ft of torque in Spirited Mode.
Where Rolls-Royce spends the most energy, though, is on Bespoke—the made-to-order details specific to a single client and car. The Spectre has become one of the brand’s most requested canvases for personalization, trailing only the Phantom in demand. Some clients have specified more than twenty individual bespoke touches on a single car. Series II gives them new tools to work with, including Duality Twill, a bamboo-derived rayon fabric making its debut on Spectre, and a new “Placed Perforation” leather technique that uses tens of thousands of precisely cut perforations to render artwork into the seating surfaces.
The dashboard’s illuminated panel now stretches the full width of the cabin, joined by a new aviation-inspired clock housed in its own glass vitrine alongside an illuminated Spirit of Ecstasy figurine. Black Badge buyers get a new “Iced Black” treatment that mattes out most of the car’s exterior brightwork, paired with a new forged wheel design offered for the first time in matte black.
At the ultra-luxury end, Project Nightingale is a different animal entirely. It is the marque’s first “Coachbuild Collection.” Announced earlier this year, Nightingale is an open two-seat convertible, hand-built at Goodwood, limited to just 100 worldwide, and available only by invitation to a small circle of clients the brand describes as having “a deep affinity for Rolls-Royce design.” Deliveries will begin in 2028.
Nightingale takes its name from Le Rossignol, which is French for “the nightingale.” It is also the name of the designers’ house near Henry Royce’s old winter estate on the French Riviera. Its proportions and torpedo-like form are drawn directly from Rolls-Royce’s experimental “EX” prototypes of the 1920s. These aluminum-bodied Phantoms that Royce himself pushed past 90 miles per hour at a time when that speed bordered on recklessness. Nightingale even carries the same red badge those prototypes wore.
At nearly 19 feet long, almost the length of a Phantom sedan, despite seating only two, Nightingale leans hard into an Art Deco, Streamline Moderne aesthetic: sheer, uninterrupted surfacing, a single unbroken line running from front to rear, and headlamps set into slender vertical bands rather than the usual horizontal treatment. Because the electric drivetrain needs no engine cooling intakes, designers had room to rework the front end entirely, while a “Piano Boot” trunk opens sideways like the lid of a grand piano.
The interior’s centerpiece is the Starlight Breeze suite, 10,500 individual points of light patterned after sound-wave recordings of actual nightingale birdsong—an idea that came from designers noticing how clearly they could hear birds singing during a near-silent early prototype drive. Each of the 100 cars will get its own bespoke color and material palette, developed exclusively for the Coachbuild program and unavailable on any other Rolls-Royce.
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