In September 2021, Rolls-Royce confirmed it was to join the ever-growing ranks of electric vehicle manufacturers with its new Spectre. This, the first ever EV from the company, was unveiled in October 2022, with the first deliveries due later this year. The Spectre is the inevitable eco-friendly response to the outlawing of new cars powered solely by internal combustion engines from 2030. However, almost 120 years ago, the one-year-old company soon to become Rolls-Royce also found itself having to contend with electrically-propelled vehicles posing a threat to its petrol-engined machines. In a heavily industrialised world, its response back then didn't need to be environmentally conscious; it just needed to be as silent, smooth and smokeless as its electric counterparts. And so Rolls-Royce's radical repulse was to come up with a V8 petrol engine – something that had never been tried in a passenger car before. It was an experiment that didn't pay off.
In the first years of the 20th century, the playing field between electric cars and internal combustionengined ones was very level. In fact, if anything, electric vehicles held the upper hand. Petrol-powered cars were generally noisy, prone to breakdown and difficult, even dangerous, to start with hand-cranking the norm – the achieving nearly 66mph in April 1899 – so they were also comparable in speeds. In fact, the only area in which electric cars lagged was their range. But in a nation like Britain, with most of its rugged cross-country road network still more suited to the days of horse-drawn transport, what few cars – of any type – existed were generally confined to short distances anyway, save for those in the hands of braver drivers.
