Anti-luce: Bentley Plays Safe For First Ev - But Torcal Must Succeed

New Bentleys don’t come around very often. The Bentayga, the last genuinely ‘new’ Bentley, was launched a decade ago. It filled a very obvious and largely risk-free gap in the brand’s range to capitalise on the SUV boom and has been hugely successful.

In the crudest terms, the new Torcal, Bentley’s first electric car, is a regulatory response to car companies needing to go electric, with a back story for the model falling in behind; it being ‘only’ five metres in length makes this the most urban-friendly Bentley… Striking-looking thing, mind.

Going electric brings inherent risk for any brand. Investments are vast, not just in the development of the model but also in new technology, software, manufacturing and the supply chain to go with it. Making that pay off is hard enough for the volume industry giants. For a smaller brand like Bentley, such investments – £350 million alone on adapting Crewe for EV production – are generational.

The approaches taken by fellow luxury car makers as they navigate this difficult path have been extreme. At one end, Range Rover has made electric propulsion simply a powertrain option on the spec sheet. At the other, Ferrari has made the Luce so wildly different from anything else by the Prancing Horse that you wonder if it’s even from Maranello.

The Torcal sits sensibly in the middle. Bentley is pushing the model as a new, modern shape that just happens to be electric, much like Rolls-Royce has with the Spectre. For Rolls, this has garnered some success and the Spectre is an established part of its range rather than a niche curiosity and a financial burden.

Bentley’s measured approach with the Torcal feels like the smartest route. It’s a new model line to bring in new buyers but not such a departure as to alienate brand loyalists. But ‘build it and they might come’ won’t cut it in today’s market: the Torcal needs to deliver real sales volume for Bentley to justify its expensive existence.