“Our centenary would be a good time to create a new limited series car,” chief executive Wolfgang Dürheimer recently told TopGear. “Yes, I could imagine there is space for a Bentley at around £1m (~$1.54 million USD).”
The company will be expecting the forthcoming Bentayga SUV to drive growth numbers, but Dürheimer is already talking about more limited-production models to help build the brand.
“The question is, do we build the standard car you would expect in that segment?” he asked. “Or do we go with lots of carbon fibre and lightweight components? Now that would be a car we could take to the big guns.”
Additional details are unclear, but TopGear speculates that Dürheimer may draw from his experience at the helm of Bugatti and as R&D head at Porsche, where he successfully brought the flagship 918 Spyder to market.
A report circulating in 2012 suggested Bentley was working on a spiritual successor to the one-off W16-powered Hunaudières concept that first appeared in 1999 at the Geneva Motor Show. The mystery halo car was expected to be the most powerful and expensive in the company’s lineup. It is unclear if the latest report is referencing the same model, which may have been only temporarily shelved while Bentley focused on Bentayga development.
Bentley will celebrate its centenary in 2019, giving the company a bit of time to finalize its decision to build a new hyper car.
Leave a Reply