Bentley’s CEO Opens Up About the Company’s Grand, Green Plans

Talking about the future comes naturally to Adrian Hallmark.

Even under cross-examination from a firing squad of journalists under the hot summer sun, even in the midst of the baking heat, amplified dad rock and whirring helicopters that make The Quail — one of Monterey Car Week’s biggest events, a $1,000-a-ticket car show where the Illuminati of the motoring world gather to gladhand — sound oddly like Vietnam circa the Tet Offensive, the chairman and CEO of Bentley Motors is unflappable while talking about his company’s plans for the next few years.

Those years are poised to be some of the most important in the 103-year-old company’s history. By 2030, the carmaker has promised to cease production of new gasoline-powered cars — a sea change for a luxury automobile maker that, as of just five years ago, sold no cars with fewer than eight cylinders — some of them featuring an engine that traced its roots back to the 1950s.

“We don’t want to complain, we don’t want to explain, we don’t want to whinge,” Hallmark says. “We just want to fix a date, make it happen, lead, and show it can be done.”

And before you go and assume this is Bentley forcing something on its buyers that they don’t want, Hallmark says quite the opposite. When they ask their customers if they’d be interested in an electric Bentley, an awful lot of hands go up.

“We’ve asked it four years ago, then three, then two, then one. And it’s gone from circa 16 percent saying yes to over 60 percent — in four years,” Hallmark says. “The speed of change is incredible.”

Bentley

He admits that some of that drive comes from customers being aware of regulations of the sort being rolled out in places like Germany, California and Bentley’s home market of the United Kingdom. (“Legislators do more to shape customer demand than car manufacturers,” he quips.) And urban areas — where Hallmark says Bentley owners tend to be — are on the forefront of those sorts of anti-internal-combustion pushes. In London, for example, electric vehicles are exempt from the £15 daily congestion charge slapped on gas- and diesel-powered cars driving into the city center.

“Our customers live in cities. They use them every day. Can you imagine, you buy a $300,000 car as your daily runaround? That’s what they do. If they’re living in a city, they’ve got to replace it with an electric car,” he says.

The new Bentley Mulliner Batur — an 18-off ultra-exclusive model with a seven-figure pricetag snapped up by the brand’s most enthusiastic customers — provides a glimpse into that electric future. While it’s still powered by the brand’s twin-turbo W12 engine — now uprated to more than 740 horsepower — its design previews where the brand will go with electric cars.

Bentley

Considering it’s part of the gargantuan Volkswagen Group that contains brands like Porsche, Audi and, of course, VW, low-volume Bentley might seem like an odd tip of the spear for the charge into an EV future. But according to Hallmark, the brand’s comparatively small size is quite the asset in the pursuit of carbon neutrality.

“It’s easier for a smaller, industrial business to completely carbon neutralize itself than it is for a big one,” he says. He’s quick to offer an example: “We’re certified carbon neutral in our production facilities. And part of it…our paint process needs gas. You can’t get the heat up quickly enough with electricity, costs a fortune as well. So, we buy renewable gas.”

“The renewable gas that we need to run our paint shop — which is a tiny paint shop — is 11 percent of the total available capacity of the U.K. If we were 20 times bigger, we couldn’t get renewable gas,” he says. But by investing in the small renewable gas industry, he says, Bentley is helping it establish itself — and thus expand. And the paint shop is only one part of the company’s broad push. Over the next two years, the company will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to modernize, expand, upcycle and reinvest in their Crewe factory and facilities to make them more efficient.

But as much as electric vehicles will be Bentley’s future, the change won’t happen overnight. (While he’s optimistic about it in the way a CEO of an electrifying car brand has to be in front of the press, even Hallmark admits there’s a lot of innovation under way in terms of charging infrastructure that still needs to come to pass in the next few years.) Before the carmaker goes all EV, plug-in hybrids will plug the gap. Two-thirds of the brand’s lineup is already offered in PHEV form, and the final piece — a plug-in hybrid version of the Continental GT — seems imminent, based on spy photos and rumors.

Will Sabel Courtney

“Plug in hybrids can be a bridge,” he says. “And we think, we’ll make some really exciting ones, with loads of power — even more than we offer today.” Indeed, Hallmark says the brand he leads will be all hybrid within two years, give or take.

But it’s the EVs that, from the sound of things, will change the way the world views the Flying B.

“Everything we do today will step up. Craftsmanship, digitalization, comfort, refinement, performance, handling, agility, safety, everything. Just like we did from the last gen to the current cars — [it will be a] massive step change,” Hallmark says. “These electric cars will be another level.”

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