Bentley drops electrification timeline; to take a more flexible approach, shorten product development times

Bentley Torcal

Bentley has now taken a more flexible strategy towards electrification instead of its previous plan to have its product range become fully electric by 2030, Autocar has reported.

The British luxury marque announced in 2020 that it would move towards full electrification and switch its product line to battery-electric propulsion by 2030, and at the time it aimed to launch its first fully electric model by 2025.

Having officially unveiled its first production battery-electric model, the Torcal yesterday, Bentley’s first BEV is a year behind its original schedule as the British marque wound back its electrification plans.

Bentley’s previously outlined strategy was no longer compatible with how the market has evolved through the 2020s, CEO Frank-Steffen Walliser told Autocar.

The next EV from Bentley is due to emerge only after 2030, and the British luxury marque now does not expect to launch another model based on the Torcal’s PPE arhictecture that also underpins the Porsche Cayenne Electric.

“With all the planning and things changing – and I’m sure regulators have new ideas every week – my answer is maybe not what you expect: we will bring in more flexibility in our strategies. We have to react a little bit more, not just say: ‘this is the plan’.

“In the past, you made a plan for 10 years and then you just went with it. We delivered the cars in a relatively stable environment. It’s not the case any more,” Walliser said.

“So we need way more flexibility: shortening the cycle times, shortening the development times. This predictable planning is honestly gone, and I don’t think it will come back,” he continued.

In this push for flexibility, Bentley has reduced development times for new models to 48 months, and the marque aims to further quicken development times to 36 months, to match group brand Volkswagen, Walliser continued.

A line-up of products featuring multiple powertrain types is key to that flexibility of planning, though there is no scope to introduce a hybrid powertrain version of the Torcal, said the brand’s CEO. This is partly due to its platform, which is EV-specific, and also because a hybrid Torcal would overlap with the Bentayga, “and I really would like to have product identity,” Walliser said.

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