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It’s a celebration at luxury car dealer Schmohl. The company has been around for 100 years and today its product range includes luxury brands Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini and Rolls-Royce. “We have opened a new showroom for the Rolls-Royce brand,” says Schmohl managing director Roderick Pike. Initially, this gap will be filled by the traditional British brand’s first fully electric luxury model, the Spectre.
History lesson
In 1923 Julius Schmohl founded Schmohl AG in Brunau, Zurich. At first it offered vehicles from the Austrian brand Steyr, later followed by the US car brand Nash, founded in 1916. In 1950, Schmohl AG became the official representative of Bentley and Rolls-Royce. The move to Glattpark took place in 2004, and official Bugatti representative status was established a year later.
“We’ve grown tremendously; we’ve doubled our headcount in the last decade,” says Pike. But today’s standout is Rolls-Royce: “We now need to reposition ourselves for the next 100 years, competitors are not sleeping. So we decided to completely remodel the Rolls-Royce showroom,” says Pike.
Spirit of Ecstasy at the Entrance
Construction of the new showroom started last summer. “We wanted to do justice to the brand’s new image because its global customer base has become significantly younger,” says Pike. The average age of customers worldwide is 43; for example, Rolls-Royce customers are, on average, younger than BMW or Mini customers. It is particularly striking: it stands out clearly from other brands. This is due, among other things, to the separate intake in the style of the Rolls-Royce radiator grille, on which the Spirit of Ecstasy is located. The heart of the new showroom is the so-called workshop: here customers choose colours, paintwork, leather, options and personalized features that cannot be found in any price list. «Rolls-Royce has endless possibilities to personalize the car. That’s what defines the brand,” says Pike.
electric luxury
The first star of the new showroom is Rolls-Royce’s new Spectre. The electric luxury ship celebrated its world premiere last year, but now it’s finally in Switzerland. «This project started almost ten years ago. Rolls-Royce product specialist and driving instructor Andi McCann explains: “We didn’t want to take an existing model and replace the internal combustion engine with an electric model, which is why the Specter is an electric car designed from the ground up.” .
The drive is via two electric motors providing a total power of 584 hp (430 kW) and a maximum torque of 900 Newton meters per axle. Thanks to a battery with a capacity of 100 kilowatt hours (kWh), the two-door car can travel about 530 kilometers, thanks to its good aerodynamics with a drag coefficient of 0.25 and despite the fact that the battery alone contributes about 700 kg to 2.9. tons curb weight.
When we try the seat, we feel the luxury: The leather in the interior is exquisitely crafted and the audio system sounds excellent. And many mechanical controls show that Rolls-Royce hasn’t embraced the trend of digitizing all buttons. There are heated seats in the back and there’s enough room even for tall people; A car with a driver? Wrong! The owner prefers to drive the 5.47 meter long Coupé himself because most customers have other vehicles in their garage that will sit right rear. How much does a luxury coupe cost? From 408,400 Swiss Francs.
Source: Blick
I’m Ella Sammie, author specializing in the Technology sector. I have been writing for 24 Instatnt News since 2020, and am passionate about staying up to date with the latest developments in this ever-changing industry.
