Spectre

The Costa Smeralda was conceived as a place without noise: villas camouflaged into the granite, coves reached on foot, an idea of luxury that whispers. The Spectre is the first automobile that truly resembles it. It glides electrically between Porto Cervo and Romazzino, crosses the most exclusive enclaves without a single vibration, and leaves not even the scent of petrol in its wake. In our complete guide to renting on the Costa Smeralda you will find the settings where this coupé is at its very best.

There is a new pleasure on offer, too: running the San Teodoro coast road with the windows down and hearing only the wind, the cicadas, the sea. With a combustion engine it is impossible; with the Spectre it is simply how things are. For guests on the north-eastern coast, Rolls-Royce rental on the Costa Smeralda includes delivery to your villa, your hotel or the quayside.

Two electric motors, all-wheel drive, a single gear: the Spectre never changes ratio, it simply accelerates. The 0–62 mph run of 4.5 seconds materialises like a wave — no peak, no pause, just liquid thrust. It is Rolls-Royce "waftability" carried to its logical conclusion: silence is no longer an engineering achievement, it is the very nature of the car.

The most aerodynamic body ever to leave Goodwood cleaves the air on the road to Palau without a whisper. The doors hold thousands of points of light — the Starlight Doors — and a chassis built around an exceptionally low centre of gravity grants a composure through corners that no petrol-engined Rolls has ever possessed. You guide it with your fingertips, listening to the landscape.

The Spectre is not a Rolls-Royce with batteries: it is proof that the marque was always, in spirit, electric. Charles Rolls intuited as much at the dawn of the twentieth century, describing the ideal car as silent, clean and free of vibration. The Spectre closes that circle more than a hundred years later, with four genuine seats and the stage presence of a great coupé.

On the practical side, electric power changes little and improves everything: charging is planned with our concierge around your itinerary and the property where you are staying, and the island's typical distances suit a car born for the open road. If the long-range coupé format appeals to you, the rest of the grand tourers for hire in Sardinia deserve a look as well.