Black Badge Spectre revealed as the most powerful Rolls-Royce ever

Rolls-Royce has announced the Black Badge Spectre – its most powerful car ever, with 650bhp and an exterior inspired by the 1980s club scene.

The Black Badge Spectre is positioned as the ‘alter-ego’ of the luxury brand’s first electric car and sets new performance standards for the marque.

The continent-crushing coupe’s twin-motor setup has been tuned to produce 650bhp – 73bhp more than the regular Spectre – and a gargantuan 793lb ft of torque, a 129lb ft increase. The Black Badge Spectre has been equipped with a ‘Spirited Mode’ – Rolls speak for launch control – that helps the Spectre shoot from 0-62mph in just 4.1 seconds.

The car also features ‘Infinity Mode’ which is accessed via a subtle infinity symbol button on the steering wheel and which unlocks all 650bhp. This is, apparently, in tribute to the power boost function of aircraft fitted with the famous Rolls-Royce Merlin engine.

Rolls-Royce says the car was developed in response to customer demand, and its engineers used hundreds of thousands of miles’ worth of customer driver data to help develop its characteristics. This included revealing that Black Badge owners tend to use their cars’ extra potential in short, sharp bursts rather than over prolonged periods of driving, hence the Infinity Mode.

The car’s chassis has also been tuned to meet the expectations of Black Badge owners, with added steering weight, and strengthened dampers to improve body control and reduce squatting under heavy throttle or braking. After in-house development, a ‘clandestine’ fleet of early Black Badge Spectres were tested in the real world by a select handful of customers.

The Black Badge identity, along with new models such as the Cullinan and Ghost, has been responsible for lowering the average age of Rolls-Royce’s customer base from over 60 to mid-40s.

That, in part, explains why the Black Badge Spectre features an aesthetic inspired by the nightclub scene of the 1980s and 90s. Alongside the now traditional darkened Spirit of Ecstasy and other ‘brightwork’, the new model comes with the option of a Vapour Violet colour inspired by the neon lights of the clubs. The famous illuminated Pantheon grille can also be specified with a coloured light for the first time, including bold shades such as Tailored Purple, Charles Blue, Chartreuse, Forge Yellow and Turchese.

Those colours can be extended to the illuminated treadplates, and bold colour choices continue inside, where the dials can be backlit in five colourscapes – Vivid Grellow, Neon Nights, Cyan Fire, Ultraviolet and Synth Wave.

In place of the traditional dashboard veneer, the Black Badge Spectre features a ‘technical fibre’ dash, constructed of woven carbon fibre and metal threads that are layered and lacquered for a three-dimensional effect. Like all Spectres, this features an illuminated ‘starscape’, but also features the Black Badge’s trademark infinity symbol, which is mirrored in the ‘waterfall’ between the rear seats.

The Spectre has been a surprising success for Rolls-Royce. It was the marque’s most in-demand model in Europe in 2024 and its second-biggest seller across the globe – figures the brand itself had exceeded expectations.