The Rolls-Royce parked on the showroom floor looked like a sleek purple spacecraft. The first electric car from the OG luxury brand, the Spectre starts around $480,000, but the model on display rang in at $580,000, easily half a million more than any car I’ve owned. Even sliding into the driver’s seat felt precarious, like I might break something, and there goes my retirement.
“These cars are put together by hand in South England,” said Tori Coppinger, corporate communications manager for the brand, as she brought my attention to a pulsing constellation pattern in the ceiling of the vehicle that can be programmed to any date. The night you were born. The last time the Cowboys won the Super Bowl (if you can remember). “There are shooting stars sometimes,” she said.
“No way,” I replied, and she smiled like someone accustomed to the finer things but who enjoyed the sight of someone who wasn’t.
Nine days earlier, I’d received an email. “Would you have any interest in driving the world’s first Ultra-Luxury Electric Super Coupé?” I would, but how? To boot: “In conjunction with Avondale Dealership’s opening of its new Rolls-Royce showroom later this month, we invite you to enjoy a test drive of the Rolls-Royce Spectre.” I booked my reservation.
On a sunny morning in May, I pulled in to the lot on a dealership-heavy stretch of Lemmon Avenue, where the shiny doors underneath the Rolls-Royce sign reminded me of a metal mouth. They were designed to resemble the signature Pantheon grille of the vehicle itself, long rectangles in an art deco style.
The previous evening had been an opening night party, and a 1926 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost Piccadilly Roadster sat in the showroom near the newfangled Spectre. It looked like Bugsy Siegel’s getaway car, though it was owned by investment banker Fred Cornwall, who politely toured me around his time capsule before he drove it back to his place in North Dallas. (He owns 15 vintage cars in total.)
His wife, Lorelie, stood beside me, both of us nodding as Cornwall pointed out the two-tone burgundy, the car’s 18-foot length, the famous silver hood ornament I never realized was a winged woman leaning over. This fixture is called “The Spirit of Ecstasy,” designed by British sculptor Charles Robinson Sykes, though people sometimes call it “the flying mistress.” It was commissioned by a man so regal his name was actually John, 2nd Baron Montagu, and he had a side thing going with the sculpture’s model, Eleanor, all of which is a story for another time, and a far cry from any automobile experience I’ve ever known.
My father is from Detroit, the Motor City, and my childhood was a series of family cars that didn’t quite make the argument for buying American: A boxy Ford Taurus, a Cutlass Ciera whose engine caught fire in our driveway, an Oldsmobile station wagon whose droopy ceiling liner was held in place with push pins. I grew up in the Park Cities, where BMWs and Cadillacs lined up outside the middle school, but the only status the Hepola car ever signaled was that we didn’t belong. I made my mom drop me off two blocks from school on her way to work, and I’d look both ways before exiting to make sure no one saw.
To grow up near money without actual money is a strange dislocation: I felt poor, even as I enjoyed the grand privileges of an American girlhood. New bikes, an Atari console, a television in the living room, though it was black and white for so long that my brother’s friend once helpfully smacked the side, thinking the set was on the blink. It was a fine day in the Hepola household when my father caved and bought a four-door Honda Accord my senior year of high school, so new it had paper plates. When I graduated from college five years later (bonus round, don’t judge), my parents gave me that Honda, my very first car at the age of 21.
I became a Honda person, a woman whose practical choice in cars says “I don’t want to think about cars.” I replaced that four-door Accord with a Civic hatchback, which was replaced by a two-door Accord, which was replaced by a fancier two-door Accord in candy-apple red, the nicest car I’d ever owned when I purchased it in 2014. But you can rest assured none of these had constellations in the ceiling. The closest I got was a moon roof.
The Spectre I would be test-driving was parked in the lot, a sleek black model, and I felt nervous as Tori walked me to the driver’s side, though I gave a little shriek when I saw the interior: pink and white leather, a Barbie dream-mobile.
“The doors of the Spectre are one and a half meters,” she told me as we slid inside. I looked at her blankly, so she clarified, “That’s almost five feet. Most doors are two feet.” Indeed, opening the rear-hinge coach door of a Rolls-Royce Spectre is such an ordeal I had to practice it several times. “We don’t call them suicide doors,” she said (though people on Twitter did when I posted a picture), but you have to be careful with that door, because it’s heavy. I performed a tap-tap push that felt like a secret handshake I kept bungling. No wonder rich people hire a butler. When I finally got it on my third try, the door opened smooth as a space capsule.
The Spectre was mine for an hour, which honestly felt like too much rope for a half-million-dollar car. “Do you want me to go with you?” Tori asked, and I kind of did, but I also wanted to take selfies, and the part of me that feared crashing a luxury automobile was trumped by the part of me that hoped to peacock around town like I owned it.
“You’ll love it,” Tori assured me, as I idled in the parking lot. “You’ll feel like a rock star and a cocooned baby at once.” And I had not even reached the hectic stream of Lemmon Avenue before I knew she was right.
The initial email described a “magic carpet ride” experience. “The Spectre is the most intelligent Rolls-Royce ever envisioned,” it read. “Intuitive, perceptive, and sharp, this stunning coupé represents the pinnacle of luxury, technology, and performance.” I suspect that’s true, but my attention was snagged by the details. An umbrella hidden in the side of the door! A radio dial of real chrome that felt heavy under my fingertips as I adjusted the Sirius to Outlaw Country and let Waylon Jennings sing me down the lane. At the first stop light, I unbuckled my sandals and kicked them onto the floorboard. Apologies to the car’s future owner, but the lambswool floor mat was fuzzy and delicious against my bare feet. Good lord this was heaven.
But where to go? The streets branching from Lemmon were empty and boring, so I headed to the only spot I knew in a short distance: Highland Park Village. I was savoring Pretty Woman fantasies as I turned onto Mockingbird — check me out, richies — but I’d miscalculated. I don’t know if you’ve tried to visit Highland Park Village at 11 a.m. on a weekday, but I burned up 10 minutes going two blocks.
Plan B: I skipped the shopping center and drove past the mansions north on Preston. Hello, Harlan Crow. Hey there, Jerry Jones. I turned onto Beverly Drive, a street I knew from Christmas light displays, but even Beverly was clogged. I wormed my way over to the quieter expanses of Bordeaux and Versailles, where the only people I saw were construction workers, so I waved at them, and they cautiously waved back.
In the movie version of my Rolls-Royce test drive, I’d pass every middle-school snob who mocked me for walking home from school as they zipped past in a Mercedes-Benz driven by their stay-at-home mom. Technically, this happened only one time, and “every middle-school snob” is pretty much only one dude, but he looms large in my imagination. The truth of my childhood is that most folks in the Park Cities were nice, but the jerks ate up all the air time, the way you can hear 99 compliments and obsess over one insult.
I had five minutes on the clock when I parked my Spectre outside the Dallas Country Club, the pinnacle of HP exclusivity. The car idled in the shade beside a golf green near a sign that said “No Trespassing,” which scratched my itch for low-key rebellion. I took pictures of my bare feet in the black lambswool mat, I took pictures standing in front of the Rolls, which was so massive and streamlined it just looked like a big black car behind me. SUVs and sedans passed, but they weren’t paying attention; I probably looked like a social media influencer.
In the end, I don’t have much use for a Rolls-Royce Spectre, though I now understand the person who does. “Like buttah,” said Susan, the PR rep, when I handed over the keys at the dealership. The showroom was quite a spectacle, too: A bar in back, a sumptuous private room with purple leather chairs where the prospective buyer can custom-design a vehicle. It was all a bit overwhelming for a Honda girl.
“There’s like six black Spectres in the entire country right now,” said Gerry Spahn, Rolls-Royce’s head of corporate communications for North America, and I’m glad I didn’t know that before I went for my test-drive. That was a close one.
Correction, 11 a.m., June 20, 2024: A photo caption in an earlier version of this story misspelled Lorelie Cornwall’s first name and misidentified a car. The caption has been corrected.
