It takes less than half a mile for the memory of the Corniche's imperious Flying Lady, and the square shoulders of the prominent plinth on which she stands, to come flooding back.
It's been three decades since I last drove a 1970s Rolls Corniche convertible - or the Shadow saloon from which this and the Corniche coupé are derived - yet the spread of the Lady's wings is unforgettable. So is the graceful, strolling motion of the silent '70s suspension beneath us. This is the first in a small series of electrically powered Rolls-Royces from restomod company Halcyon, a Surrey-based start-up that opened its doors three years ago and will busy itself for the next few years restoring and modifying 120 Rolls-Royces from this special era, half electrified and half with their original 6.75-litre pushrod V8 engine still in place.
The project is the brainchild of three young engineers - Matthew Pearson, Charlie Metcalfe and Will Burdett - who met at Bath University, worked together on the university's Formula Student programme and launched themselves after graduation into the modern UK motor industry. For a time they went in different ways, but always kept in touch. "We'd talk about building cars that people like us could get enthusiastic about," says Metcalfe. "We'd been through the Covid era, and it seemed to us that people were too pessimistic about the future of cars, and especially EVs. That led us to the idea of a series of electrified Rolls-Royces. After all, this was a company that had spent a century trying to build powertrains as quiet and refined as electric motors..."
The trio decided Shadow-era Rolls-Royces were right for the job. The cars were perfect for electrification: big enough to carry batteries unobtrusively and for their weight (and weight distribution) in electrified form to parallel the original. With help from early investors they set up business, along the way launching an adjacent company called Evice Technologies to offer the know-how affordably to other small firms. The specific models they alighted on were Shadow 2s (and offshoots) made between 1977 and 1980, because it was a well-developed car by then and there were few engineering changes during those years.
