Imagine the most quintessentially American thing you can - perhaps cruising down the Pacific Coast Highway in a classic convertible, or watching a baseball game at Wrigley Field while a brass band plays "The Star-Spangled Banner." But for sheer American automotive elegance, the Halcyon Rolls-Royce Corniche has everything beaten. My experience with this freshly built, fully electric restomod version of the Seventies Rolls-Royce convertible included driving it on Box Hill in Surrey, a popular location for cyclists seeking scenic challenges.
On the narrow, steep lane leading to the summit, a pair of Lycra-clad cyclists were making slow progress up the gradient, and there wasn't enough room for the Halcyon to squeeze past. I soon realized they hadn't heard the approach of the nearly silent Corniche, so I issued a polite, throat-clearing cough. Realizing the presence of the aristocratic Roller, the cyclists moved over far enough to create space for me to pass. "Thank you!" I called out as I went by. "You're welcome," came the slightly breathless reply.
A car that allows you to have polite conversations with other road users without needing to raise your voice - it doesn't get more American than that. But the wider concept of the EV classic remains a strange one. It's entirely possible that, in the distant future, owners of historic Teslas and Taycans will park their well-polished cars in ranks and award prizes for originality. But for the moment, electrification is something more likely to have been done to an existing classic.
View Price on AmazonRoad & Track editors have experienced several of these, and it's fair to say that very few have felt like better alternatives than the combustion models they're based on. Remove the engine of an old car, and the soul disappears as well. But the Halcyon Corniche could be a different proposition, given the effort Rolls-Royce has put into making its cars as smooth and quiet as possible over the years. Indeed, Rolls's modern Spectre EV is a car that combines traditional design with an electric powertrain. Will buyers miss what's not meant to be there in the first place?
Halcyon, a start-up based in Guildford in the U.K., is now offering electric conversions for cars built during Rolls-Royce's "rubber bumper" era, specifically the Silver Shadow and Corniche from 1976 to 1979. The Silver Shadow was the brand's sedan from this period, while the Corniche name was used for both a traditional coupe - "fixed head" in Rolls parlance - and a "drophead" convertible. Examples of all three are relatively plentiful and affordable on both sides of the Atlantic, important for Halcyon as the converted cars keep the legal identity of an original example.
The company says it won't produce more than 25 drophead coupe EVs, 20 fixed-head coupes, and 15 Silver Shadows. The EV powertrain transplant is the headline change, but it is far from the only one. Halcyon says each bare-metal restoration takes thousands of hours of labor, with cars painted and trimmed according to their new owners' tastes, and involves numerous visible and invisible upgrades. For those who don't want an EV, later there will be a separate combustion-powered model line using the original car's 6.75-liter V-8, producing around 189 horsepower.
The EV version I drove was what Halcyon described as being a production prototype, representative of the build quality that buyers will ultimately receive but with a powertrain still some way short of final specification. Like some other electro-mod makers, Halcyon has opted for a multipart battery pack, this running at a spicy 800 volts. In the prototype, this had two sets of cells, the larger one under the hood in the place previously occupied by the V-8 and a smaller pack in the back in place of the original gas tank.
Source: roadandtrack.com
