To Bentley’s design centre, so new that the paint has barely dried, to experience something of a landmark: the conceptual forebear of the first ever Bentley EV. Somewhat appropriately, the new design centre occupies the building that once housed the heart of Bentley’s operations, including its executive suite and customer facing reception.
The address, on the historic Pyms Lane, is a considerable upgrade after several decades of design operations in a nondescript shed tucked away behind the paintshop and factory buildings.
A select group of media attended the debut of the new Bentley concept, known as the EXP 15, an event that also marked the shift to a dedicated, capacious design studio (even if the new car was designed in the old, cramped space). Before we dive in to the future, the array of priceless pre-war automobiles assembled at the CW1 House visitor centre are illuminated by a glossy film that skips through company history like a stone skimming the surface of a pond. Bentley is a company of big cars, big events, and big personalities, its 106-year history digested into a series of anecdotes.
A company's heritage exists in two forms, the historical record, pored over by countless enthusiasts with the goal of creating an immutable, unvarnished truth that will stand for ever. And the cherry-picked PR version, a series of people, events and objects that can be shuffled and aligned into a suitable timeline, all the better for bolstering current product and supporting future plans.
Before we’re treated to a reverent reveal of the EXP 15, Bentley’s head of design, Robin Page, gives us a whistlestop tour of the ethos and approach that characterises the company’s modern era, and why this new concept – and the car it previews – is both reverential and revolutionary.
Luckily for Bentley, there’s a rich heritage to draw upon. The antecedent to the concept is one of the more colourful company legends, the Blue Train Car. The story of how racing driver and ‘Bentley Boy’ Woolf Barnato once drove through the night to beat the eponymous train service from Côte d’Azur to Calais is oft cited and sometimes emulated but doesn’t really stand up to rigorous fact checking. History isn’t even sure what car was supposed to be used, but for the benefit of a good story, the focus has settled on a majestic 1930 Speed Six coupé built by coachbuilders Gurney Nutting.
This car, currently on show at the Bentley design HQ, fits the bill in spirit if not in solid fact. A magnificent three-seater with a fast-back style cabin, it comes close to representing the ur-form of Bentley, a four-wheeled encapsulation of power, glamour, scale, engineering obsession and upper-class derring-do. As part of the media package, that fabled encounter between petrol, steam and French railway timetables has been recreated in moody black and white CGI, as if Christopher Nolan had directed the Polar Express.
It's therefore unsurprising to discover that Gurney Nutting car forms the spiritual template for the EXP 15. Although we’re given a glimpse of the concept in CGI form during Page’s presentation, in the metal it really impresses. The production car that will eventually follow is being dubbed an ‘urban SUV’, which is Bentley speak for a car under 5m long. Nevertheless, EXP 15 is imposing, imperiously so, a high riding, crossover-style vehicle with a silhouette and DLO that draw clear parallels with the lines of the 1930 car.
That’s not to say there’s anything old fashioned about the new concept. In profile, the EXP 15 delivers glamour aplenty, and this richness continues through to the interior (of which more later). If the side is svelte, then front and rear treatments put forward a significantly more pugnacious - and braver - face. EXP 15's front end is an audacious from the status quo, eschewing the round headlights that have been a signifier of Bentley-ness since the marque’s earliest days.
Instead, the front is a canvas for the art of digital lighting design, better when it’s animated and rather cliff-like and imposing at rest. Why imitate the round headlights of old when modern tech allows for far more powerful, ultra slim LED units? That, at least, was the thinking. At the rear, too, there’s more bluff architecture, with a large light graphic delineating the rear profile, its ‘wings’ forming the end of the broad rear haunches.
Page runs us through a set of core principles and buzz phrases that are encapsulated in the EXP 15, inside and out, from ‘upright elegance’ to ‘bold gravitas’. It’s certainly bold, but not hugely mould-breaking, even if the angry hum of social media seems intent on litigating another Jaguar-style controversy.
Most importantly for the wailing keyboard warriors, this concept is definitely not a light re-skin of the new EV, just as 2019’s Bentley EXP 100 GT only hinted at the future direction of the Continental GT. As such, it’s a ‘vision car’, with forms, materials and even interfaces that represent fresh thinking and future directions for Bentley’s design team. Those who wail, gnash teeth and pound out furious screeds are missing the point.
Certain elements are taken straight from the concept car playbook, such as the three-seat configuration that harks back to Barnato’s 1930 model. In the EXP 15, three seats are paired with an asymmetric door arrangement, with one side featuring a coach rear door that opens up to reveal a capacious passenger seat. This in turn can be slid back to accommodate luggage or even a dog (rendered here as ‘Woof Barnato’, arf arf), or even fully reclined into a bed.
The passenger seat also rotates to greet, or eject, the guest when the doors are opened (‘you have the perfect Instagram shot,’ Page notes, perhaps mindful that half the assembled company will be supplying snappy reels rather than wordy treatises).
There’s yet more luggage space under the piano-hinged bonnet (another nod to the 30s), and the boot space is a symphony in sybaritic options, complete with picnic seating, an occasional light and pop-up champagne storage (naturally).
Back to the future
The concept is also the first car to bear Bentley’s new wings, the first redesign since 2002 and only the fifth different mark used in over 106 years. The last set of wings were deemed a little owlish; today’s avian inspiration is the peregrine falcon, an edgier, faster and altogether more cutting-edge bird. And, the company notes pointedly, they were designed in house, unlike some other brands.
Page is adamant that the new studio and its output will convey the holistic sense of design togetherness that pervades Bentley today. It's a big, broad portfolio that streches from concepts like this to 'regular' production models, as well as partnerships like the ones with Macallan Whisky and Naim Audio, high-profile side hustles like the Bentley Home range of Italian furniture to the new Bentley Residences, just starting to poke out of the soggy but pricey ground that makes up the Miami oceanfront.
There’s an undeniable nostalgia contained within the evocative tang of hydrocarbons and faded leather, and the sanctity of history and patina is attainable only through the passing of time. It’s an emotional state conjured up with ease by the spread of pre-war road and race cars in the CW1 building. One of the processes behind the EXP 15 was a material exploration, a search for sustainable ways of creating a sense of a living, breathing machine.
There were experiments in backlighting textiles, creating lattices, layers and depth, as well as digitally scanning the play of light through crystal and replicating the enticing but imperfect ways it forms dynamic and intriguing patterns. EXP 15 combines traditional wool textiles with 3D-printed titanium, an idiosyncratic mash-up that encapsulates the nebulous world of luxury craft and design. Bentley describes it as ‘a mix of the traditional, artisanal and sustainable, combined with the ultra-modern, technical and futuristic.’
In many respects, the interior approach is best described by that awkward portmanteau, ‘phygital’. Bentley has leaned hard into this combo, creating a screen architecture that splices a layer of transparent graphics atop watch-inspired underpinnings, the so-called ‘mechanical marvel’. Yet another melding of analogue and digital is demonstrated in the EV’s soundscape, derived from musicians ‘playing’ the beats, thrum and drone of a V8 engine on various percussive instruments.
Like many of its peers in the world of luxury, Bentley is transitioning from a purveyor of subtle excellent to a company that creates ‘cool shit’, stuff that is instantly and eye-catchingly alluring. Think of how modern cinematic post-production adds a layer of depth and atmosphere through drifting motes of digital dust, pollen and smoke; the digitised light patterns that flash across the Bentley’s screens provide a similar sense of depth and dynamism.
I’m being a bit unfair. A whistlestop tour of the adjoining factory reveals an abundance of excellence in the myriad hand-crafted and highly skilled processes that go up into making these mighty cars. You could dismiss the end results as cool, kooky or even tasteless, but whatever your take, the eye candy of a Bentley, inside and out, has been created with care.
Think of the EXP 15 as an attempt to haul this expensive and intensive combination of myth, magic and elbow grease into the modern era. Design has always had an element of theatre, and luxury design even more so. The EXP 15 needs to function like five minutes of Rachel Zegler on the London Palladium balcony, not the two hours spent between curtain up and curtain call. Page and his team are under no illusions that the role of the EXP 15 is to grab eyeballs and start debate. It doesn't need an encore - it's the start of the next act.
