Bentley was always going to face a tough hill to climb when it came to squaring their very luxurious and brilliantly constructed but heavy and lumbering cars with the ever climbing bar of emissions standards.
And now with their largest and thirstiest car, the Mulsanne, Bentley seems to have abandoned any further plans to shoehorn some type of emissions cutting measure or technology and embraces fully electric propulsion.
Speaking to Autocar UK while showing off their current-generation Mulsanne Extended Wheelbase, Hans Holzgartner, Bentley’s product and marketing manager, said that a full EV powertrain was already under the company’s microscope.
Mr Holzgartner even mentioned how possible new legislation in China would mean that no matter how efficient hybrids get, any attempt to lessen the exhaust emissions in the next Mulsanne if they had left the current car’s 6.75-litre twin-turbo V8 (which won't be produced beyond the current Mulsanne) in there would be rendered moot.
Apparently, officials either at Bentley or parent company Volkswagen were privy to some draft paperwork that suggested that fully electric cars could be the only vehicles allowed into some major metropolitan areas in Chinese cities. That’s a market that Bentley cannot afford to lose, especially when sale of long wheelbase cars thrive there.
China isn’t the only country considering instituting such measures in order to curb pollution. Germany is also thinking along similar lines with their plan to have zero-emission motorways in just a few decades. Paris, recently, passed a law that prohibits older and more polluting cars from entering the city with even stricter laws coming.
When quizzed about how the Mulsanne would handle a transition away from petrol power, Holzgartner said that bigger and heavier cars like it were much more suited to it as the silence and battery weight wouldn’t be a factor customers would object to over, say, buyers of conventionally lighter or sportier cars.
He added: “With a Mulsanne-sized car, it’s all about torque anyway. The delivery characteristics of electric drive — loads of bottom-end torque, almost silent delivery, very smooth — they all fit,”
“Our challenge is to make something that’s as interesting to drive as a current Bentley, because while a Mulsanne will be driven in almost silent mode even with a petrol engine, if you’ve got a Mulsanne Speed you’ll want to let rip every so often. That’s going to be the challenge: creating something that can be fun as well.”
Of course, there is something lost in that sensation of having a thumping V8 under the bonnet. While the sound itself may have been muted in the Mulsanne’s cabin, there’s a certain character that Bentley is looking to replicate or replace outright in the inevitable transition to electric drive.
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