The Rolls-Royce Corniche felt like a throwback even upon its release in 1971, and then it loitered around the Crewe production line for another 24 years like the 13th Duke of Wybourne in the grounds of a French maid’s finishing school (‘With my reputation? Has no one thought of the consequences!’) I imagine the design mood board was composed mainly of vintage pornography. If Hugh Hefner’s silk dressing gown had wheels, he’d have met his party guests in one of these.
Its air of roguish entitlement was further established in its movie roles. Michael Caine’s Brillcreemed gold-button-blazered con-man in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels drove a Corniche while attempting to deprive heiresses of their diamonds in the name of charity. In 10, Dudley Moore cruised around in one when he wasn’t perving on his oiled and topless neighbours with a telescope.
This is a car with character: the sort that might get you cancelled. That is not something normally levied at electric cars, but guess what: the Corniche you see before you, which looks like it was specced by Jimi Hendrix or Prince, has had its 6.75-litre V8 innards removed and replaced by state-of-the-art electric motors and batteries. In fairness, most Corniche owners could use a heart transplant of their own, after all those duty-free cigars and kilograms of Colombian imports.
(Image credit: Halcyon)
I despair of the numb and homogenised experience that most electric cars offer, and I maintain that silent, heavy, gearless electric sports cars are like microwaved frozen pizza: flavourless cardboard. Yet for a classic car that’s already heavy and was designed to be quiet and smooth, a digital restomodding is the perfect recipe. You get all the nostalgia, and none of the leaks. Therefore, an electric Rolls-Royce Corniche makes superb sense. It has been improved upon. It embraces Sir Henry Royce’s mantra: ‘Take the best that exists and make it better.’
The people who have made these improvements are called Halcyon – or Matthew Pearson (CEO), Charlie Metcalfe (COO) and Will Burdet (CTO); three chins who studied engineering at Bath and went on to work for Lunaz, which also restores and converts British classics. You can bring a 1970s Rolls or Bentley to their modern workshop between Farnborough and Guildford, or they’ll find you one. Some customers arrive with their father’s car, hoping to restore and futureproof it for the next generation. You don’t have to convert it to electric; they’ll also renovate your V8 if you want your bauble to still burble.
A decent donor Corniche costs between £40,000-£80,000. For Halcyon to work their magic, you’re looking at £420,000+ on top of that, plus taxes (if you bother yourself with that sort of thing). It is a lot of money. However, should you do a particularly successful job when you’re next in Antibes separating a dowager duchess from her 10-carat assets, it could just be in a day’s work.
This purple machine is the company’s demonstrator. It used to be creamy yellow, with rubber bumpers and left-hand drive (like the Corniche in 10). California is a good hunting ground for donors, because a lot found their way there, and the climate’s been nice to them. In this car, every nut and bolt has come off, but some subframe and core suspension has been retained. Now known as the Highland Heather Corniche, the new hue is a nod to the moors and the Scottish Reliability Trails that Rolls-Royce entered with its Silver Ghost in 1907; a punishing 748-mile endurance test across the most demanding yet beautiful landscape in Britain. Inside, there are a number of rather lovely details which celebrate this. The Silver Ghost crushed the opposition in 1907, scoring 976 out of a possible 1,000 points which first cemented R-R’s reputation as builders of ‘The Best Car in the World’.
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The Highland Heather model has 400bhp, but Halcyon offers an upgrade to 500bhp. The original car had up to 325bhp. Overall performance doesn’t feel so different in this car, but its waftiness has never been more magic carpet-y. The charge port is where the fuel filler was. It can fast-charge from 20-80% in half an hour. The standard range is 250 miles via a 77kWh battery, though a bigger 94kWh pack is available that’ll extend it to 300 miles. Re-gen braking hasn’t been added to this car, but it will be. Open differential is set to change to a limited slip diff, which will increase torque by almost 85% (up to 590Nm), which means it’ll put away at lower speeds much more energetically; hopefully it’ll still pass the all-important Champagne test whereby your passengers won’t spill their drinks.
The only hints from the outside that this car has spent 5,000 hours being reborn are the LED headlights and mohair (not vinyl) roof. Inside, the updates are subtle, but it’s all new from the dash to the seats, the wheel-mounted drive selector and the drop-down display that can hide the Apple CarPlay-enabled sat-nav and infotainment screen when you don’t want your 21st century ways exposed.
A celebration of the Scottish Reliability Trials from 1907.
Image credit: Halcyon
The charge port is located by the original fuel cap.
Image credit: Halcyon
Halcyon are working on another special project at the moment: They’re restoring a Corniche previously owned by Hollywood golden couple Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews, writer-director of 10 and Dudley Moore’s co-star, respectively. It will feature a Mary Poppins umbrella, an inlaid Sound of Music mountain-scape, and a pattern from a coffee cup in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which Edwards also directed.
For those who hanker for the brazen glamour of the 1970s and 80s, the Corniche and its four-door cousin, the Silver Shadow, are an enticing portal to the unapologetic life and times of Peter Sellers, Paul Raymond and Zsa Zsa Gabor. No longer coachbuilding their cars with the advent of unibody construction, Rolls-Royce built too many of these models (6,823 Corniches and 30,057 Shadows), which saw used values dive. Due to the cost of parts and servicing, many were not very well maintained in the 1990s and 2000s and the image became similarly threadbare.
But now the cool factor is higher than ever; ‘No F***s Given’ is an aspirational motto for the new generation, and nothing says it better than a ULEZ-skewering Roller. The chaps at Halcyon have given this Corniche back its lustre. It extols the spirit of rockstars and rogues, of excommunication and, of course, ecstasy.
(Image credit: Halcyon)
