The world’s largest producer of 12-cylinder petrol engines will be a car manufacturer producing only electric cars within ten years. Bentley on Thursday unveiled the Beyond 100 plan to keep it on the automotive map for the second hundred years it begins after last year’s celebrations.
“In 2030, we will not be producing any gasoline engine,” said Adrian Hallmark, his boss, at the introduction of Bentley. This will completely change the focus of the British luxury vehicle manufacturer, which belongs to the Volkswagen Group, in less than a decade.
The first fully electric Bentley will be introduced “until” in 2025, but at the same time work is already underway on several electric cars at once. The carmaker has not yet published the details or the type of car. However, the state could be the first electric car on the modular PPE platform of the Volkswagen Group for large electric cars, a branch Automotive News Europe magazine then he writes that he will get the body of an SUV. Representatives of the brand promise that it will still be a real Bentley with everything, even if there are no longer twelve cylinders bubbling under the hood.
However, the Crewe carmaker will start the electric revolution next year, when two plug-in hybrids will go on sale. Bentley again did not publish more details, but it is speculated that it will be the Bentayga and Flying Spur models.
“In 2026, all our cars will only be electric or plug-in hybrid,” said Matthias Rabe, who is responsible for technical matters on the brand’s board of directors. “By 2025, we will reduce the consumption of our offer by 25 percent,” he added. The fact that in 2023 each offered model will have its own hybrid variant should also help to reduce consumption. The transition to purely electric models in 2030 will not be as dramatic as it might seem at first glance.
On the other hand, Bentley, although he admits that this is also one of the reasons, is not doing so just because of stricter regulations. The European ones will continue to push carmakers to even lower fleet CO2 emissions than the average 95 g / km today, while the British ones want to ban the sale of internal combustion and hybrid engines from 2030 (originally it was supposed to happen in 2035).
But according to Chris Craft, who is responsible for sales and marketing on the brand’s board, up to 55 percent of the brand’s customers would also consider buying an electric Bentley. The demand is therefore likely to exist and is not entirely negligible.
However, Bentley’s future is not only electric, but also sustainable, as its representatives emphasized several times at Thursday’s event. This means using exclusively environmentally friendly materials directly in cars. These are, for example, decorative surfaces made only of wood from naturally fallen trees, stored for a long time in peat bogs, rivers or lakes, or the use of imitation leather from by-products of wine production. Last year, the EXP 100 GT concept showed not only these materials.
This effort has one main goal – to make the whole of Bentley carbon neutral in 2030. That is, so that together they do not emit any carbon emissions into the air.
Even today, the Crewe plant is carbon neutral, which was helped, for example, by the production of part of the energy through solar panels or the purchase of another part of the energy from renewable sources. In addition, all suppliers will have the status of a sustainable company by the end of the year. However, the carmaker wants to go even further with its production facilities, because in 2030 they are to actively contribute to the reduction of carbon in the atmosphere – which means that the factory will be carbon positive.
The year 2020 is still quite a significant test for the carmaker. “We thought this year would be a record store and the first quarter was really the best in history,” says Adrian Hallmark. But then came the covid-19 pandemic, which hit the car industry hard.
From the second half of March to the first half of May, the factory in Crewe stood, the carmaker was also forced to close its dealerships (which should contribute to the digitization of the entire process of buying a car). All of this caused Bentley significant financial losses in the second quarter of 2020.
The carmaker thus proceeded to restructure – it began to save and was forced lay off part of the staff. Originally there were to be a thousand, but in the end, due to improved financial condition, the number decreased to 800. Despite financial losses and closed production facilities, Hallmark predicts that this year the brand will sell over 10,000 cars worldwide. Last year it was 11,006 cars. A young model line, which is a maximum of about two years old, should help to achieve good sales results.
According to current data from the analytical company JATO Dynamics, the British sold 2,239 cars in Europe from January to September, 371 less than last year. In September alone, however, the brand’s European sales rose by 49 percent.
On the contrary, speculation that Bentley should move from Porsche under the wings of Audi, which the German trade magazine Automobilwoche, were not discussed at all at Thursday ‘s presentation of the Beyond 100 plan.
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