I Took A $560,000 Electric Rolls-Royce Spectre Car Camping In the Rain at Laguna Seca for Monterey Car Week

Every year on the Wednesday of Monterey Car Week, a veritable pilgrimage of six-, seven-, and eight-figure cars rolls up from Los Angeles through the Central California coastline. But 2025 marked my longest drive ever, in hours and minutes, and not just because I borrowed an all-electric Black Badge Spectre from Rolls-Royce with the intention of camping next to the infamous Corkscrew at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca.

First, I hit protests on the 101 freeway going out of town at 7:45 a.m. Signs reading “Release the Files, Not the Pedophiles” brought on bumper-to-bumper traffic for almost an hour, not to mention a chorus of honking that I struggled to differentiate between sarcastic, frustrated, and supportive. Then, the whole freeway slowed to a crawl in Santa Barbara, where Caltrans continues the years-long process of rebuilding roads after the catastrophic mudslides in 2018. A massive fire north of Santa Maria also turned plenty of necks into rubber, slowing me down further just as I stopped to top up the Spectre’s batteries.

Amidst the drama, the cops from L.A. to Monterey know what’s up too. Each year hundreds of big supercar fish get hooked for speeding, so I took it easy, cruising in quite possibly the quietest and most comfortable car on the entire planet. The Spectre’s official range rating of 266 miles seemed fairly solid throughout, which helped me plan for just one stop over the course of my planned 318-mile drive day. I wanted to arrive with plenty of range to spare in Monterey, since the peninsula invariably winds up totally overwhelmed—exactly the trafficky, stressful life I hoped to avoid by camping in my Rolls-Royce!

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The Quietest Road I Know

Through Ventura, I spotted a few different visions of classic British motoring. A first-generation Lotus Elise, never sold here in the United States when new, bounced and pranged over every tiny crack in the road ahead as I splayed out in sumptuous luxury. That whole car probably weighs about as much as my seat alone, I thought as I ripped past on a floating cloud of electrons. Multiple McLarens and Aston Martins passed me, though, but I figured I might see the drivers soon enough pulled over on the side for expensive tickets.

While in Walmart, the EVgo station maxed out the Spectre’s 195-kilowatt charge rate, so after 29 minutes I’d added 173 miles of range. Not exactly quick, but happily, doing so cost me only 3 bucks and 44 cents. Especially compared to what a V12-powered luxury coupe might average in MPG, all while I also caught up on a few emails before unplugging and hitting the road again.

Then again, speeding fines are just fine as long as you pay them, right? For the average car owner, not so much, and me too as I juggled options for where to charge the Rolls. Eventually, I picked an EVgo station outside a Walmart that promised 64 cents per kilowatt-hour, because I wanted to pick up some instant coffee. Going for Gold with Nescafe rather than having my butler bring along the Marzocco espresso machine, or at least finding a cone and filter for true pour over drip deliciousness—how gauche, very anti-one-percenter of me, I know. 

Ventilated and massaging seats turned on, through Atascadero and Paso Robles, ambient temps started to climb. I relied heavily on adaptive cruise and lane-keep assist, which brought up one of my favorite hypothetical questions: Does an EV drive itself more efficiently than a human can? Whether the temps or the computer brain was to blame, my range performance definitely started to plummet. I should have left the Walmart parking lot with 81 miles to spare but instead, I now faced a low 20-mile range buffer. Time to hunt for charge stations again, sigh.

By the time I turned off the 101 toward Monterey, though, the range remaining started to climb. Oh well, other than a semi-truck that broke down, the rest of the drive went quite smoothly. But all the delays meant I was now running late, and still needed to pick up Laguna Seca credentials, test-drive a turbodiesel G-Wagen Wolf restomod—literally the opposite of my silent Rolly-Polly—and maybe top up a bit on charge for the next day of fun.

This time, at an Electrify America station, I added 29 percent charge in just 11 minutes. For free! Then I headed up the winding hill toward the track, clouds starting to roll in as I silently slid in to meet with friends who run IDR, Italian Design and Racing, and bring a fleet of vintage Ferraris to Monterey. The crew only spotted my famous hood ornament and headlights, so ghostly does the Spectre approach.

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Setting Up Camp as Rain Rolls In

I wanted to sleep in a Rolls originally for the comedy factor, but even if a Cullinan SUV sounds ideal, the rear seats don’t fold quite as flat as my aging back might like. As the prospect of overnight rain started to grow, I began wondering whether the Spectre’s front seat might recline enough to make sleeping in the car better than getting all my gear wet by setting up a tent. But the Spectre’s front seats also recline surprisingly far from flat, probably to retain rear seat room for the chauffeur’s boss—not to mention all the massaging and ventilating equipment.

So in the end, I unfurled the tent and set up on the gravel pad, which Laguna Seca packed so hard that my stakes struggled to even go in a centimeter. I needed a rain fly against the mist already, much less any incoming rain, so once again I tested out the Spectre. Oh well, even if that Starlight Headliner mimics a night under the Milky Way, I wanted to get a good night’s sleep before the busiest few days of my calendar year kicked off. I put trust in my Big Agnes Rapide SL sleeping pad, which I bought after seeing friends use them while snow camping during a Navy SEAL's winter survival school last year, and hoped for minimal rain and wind.

Just to be safe, I shared a few drams of Japanese aged whisky with the guys, pinkies up as an enthusiastic group of mildly beer-drunk old white guys surrounded the Rolls asking questions. This type, who shows up at Laguna Seca with more money in trailers than I did in the $566,100 Spectre—and who typically only seems impressed by vintage Ferrari race cars—sounded surprisingly curious about this Salamanca blue and Mandarin orange behemoth.

Yes, it’s electric. The quietest car on the planet, awesome to road trip in other than stopping to charge, obviously. The most common refrain: “You’re going to camp here?” Though my friends had spread the word, so my reputation at least somewhat preceded me, nobody could believe that anyone in a Rolls would be camping in the rain, in a tent. Get used to it buddy.

By the time I tucked in, almost midnight, I figured the sun would wake me up in the morning. But soft rainfall and wind snapping the un-staked rainfly kept me up a bit, and more than once I again revisited the idea of climbing out of the tent and into the Rolls. Only the hassle of needing to then put clothes back on kept me at least somewhat rational in my delirium.

Searching Out the True Spirit of Monterey Car Week

As my gear took a soaking overnight, down at the immaculate lawn of the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, Rolls-Royce the company planned a gathering of all eight generations of the Phantom to honor the centenary of the world’s longest-tenured automotive nameplate. These immaculate sedans served as a reminder of Car Week’s importance at the upper echelons of the automotive industry. And auction results this year proved that rather than a global financial bubble, despite market gains lately amid a world on fire from divisive politics, wars, and climate disasters, Monterey itself is something of a bubble, too. 

Record sales of supercars sold to what Pebble Concours regulars might consider “new money” buyers helped make 2025 the second-highest total year of sales ever, at $432.8 million. Top results included a Ferrari Daytona SP3 that sold for charity at $26 million, and others in the class that Hagerty considers “modern supercars” making up 39 percent of sales (versus 19 percent last year). 

"You’re seeing so many more supercars in town,” Craig Jackson of Barrett-Jackson told me at The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering. “But you’re seeing the mix in the auctions the same way. You’re seeing that generational change to people who want to buy cars that A, they can relate to and B, are fun to drive.”

“You know, you see the stock market at records, and I think as we look forward, there’s more confidence that the tariffs aren’t going to bleed through,” Jackson said. “If you see what’s coming out of Monterey, trying to put it in perspective, I think you see that people are much more enthusiastic. They’re spending money. And if the fed lowers interest rates a couple of times, I think that’ll help, too.”

To my mind, the supercar sales trends suggests millennial tech bros looking for fleeting peak life experiences, rather than collectibles. Which I can appreciate, even if the sheer volume of money changing hands makes my stomach churn. Outside of auction houses and the racetrack, I spotted Paganis and Bugattis galore while cruising around in my Rolls (or the Ducati Panigale V4 I traded it for after a day suffering through traffic). But Monterey these days equally serves as a forum for new car debuts from high-end automakers, as much as the vintage racing, concours, and auction frenzy. 

Here, billionaires appeared to want to leave even the 1 percent behind, and one-off builds with individualization cranked up to the max were typified best by the announcement from Gordon Murray Special Vehicles that a customer specced five new cars to resemble the iconic McLaren F1 GTR—financing the design, development, production, and homologation of the cars. My guesstimate at the price for such a project intended for a single individual? How about $50 million, minimum.

Meanwhile, back at the track, camping in a tiny tent outside the enormous Rolls, I figuratively and metaphorically overlooked the original spirit of Car Week: the Motorsport Reunion. I awoke before sunrise the next morning, not just to the sounds of light sprinkling on the rainfly, after a night on the air pad interrupted by the warmup rhythms of carbureted, unmuffled race cars echoing off the hillside. 

Next year, whether or not in the sumptuous luxury of a Rolls-Royce and almost certainly not in an electric car—to minimize my anxiety levels and maximize my time spent at the track—I definitely plan to spend more nights at Monterey Car Week camping at Laguna Seca. And maybe, if I get lucky, squeeze in some vintage racing, too.

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