Halcyon’s $570K Electric Rolls-Royce Corniche Rewrites What Luxury Feels Like
Key takeaways
- This hand-built Drophead Coupe blends 1960s charm with modern all-electric silence—and it works.
- Reach around the steering wheel and pull the old-school column-mounted shifter down until the needle points to D.
- Royce, who died in 1933, never built an electric car.
Why this matters: an automotive development that could shape industry direction or buying decisions.
This hand-built Drophead Coupe blends 1960s charm with modern all-electric silence—and it works.
Reach around the steering wheel and pull the old-school column-mounted shifter down until the needle points to D. Ease off the brake and squeeze the accelerator. The Halcyon Rolls-Royce Corniche Drophead Coupe (fancy English coachbuilder talk for convertible) oozes smoothly and silently away from a standstill, tires crunching on the gravel driveway the only audible clue that we’re underway. Henry Royce, the perfectionist engineer whose passion for smoothness and silence created the core values upon which the 122-year-old Rolls-Royce brand still trades, would be impressed.
Royce, who died in 1933, never built an electric car. But he was, ironically, a talented, self-taught electrical engineer who owned a company that made, among other things, electric motors before he met the wealthy and aristocratic entrepreneur Charles Rolls in 1904 to found Rolls-Royce. Even more ironically, after driving an electric vehicle made by the Columbia Automobile Company of Hartford, Connecticut, in April 1900, it was Rolls who saw the future potential of EVs. “The electric car is perfectly noiseless and clean,” he declared, 123 years before Rolls-Royce would deliver its first electric-powered car, the Spectre. “There is no smell or vibration. They should become very useful when fixed charging stations can be arranged.”