Bentley outlines its bold plan to go entirely electric within a decade

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CREWE – British luxury carmaker Bentley has publicly announced its commitment to the Five-in-Five plan, which will see the brand launch one new electric vehicle a year from 2025 through to 2030.

It’s a part of Bentley’s Beyond100 strategy that aims to reinvent the brand for the electric future, which includes making the Crewe manufacturing facility carbon neutral by 2030 while simultaneously transforming it into a next-generation manufacturing plant that still retains all the hallmarks of the brand’s handcrafted craftsmanship.

Bentley’s CEO Adrian Hallmark confirmed that 2021 saw the brand record its best-ever sales performance record in history, selling 14,659 cars throughout the year, a 31 per cent increase from 2020. It was a trend that was also mirrored at Rolls-Royce, and largely brought on by the lack of luxury global travel at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This result in turn is being rolled into the ambitious Five-in-Five plan, backed by a £2.5 billion (S$4.45 billion) sustainable investment to prepare the brand for an EV future that will see Bentley become an exclusively EV brand by 2030.

Hallmark explained, “Our poll of the present Bentley customer base showed that almost all of them imagined themselves driving electric vehicles by 2030, so this reassures us that we are on the right path with the electrification of our product range. It’s about redefining Bentley as a benchmark, not just for cars, but for sustainability.”

The brand’s sustainability efforts include the upping on-site energy production at Crewe, with the goal to increase the number of solar panels on location from 30,000 to 40,000 in the next two years.

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The production plant has already been carbon neutral since 2019 and now Bentley’s partners are also being encouraged to support Bentley’s goal of being end-to-end carbon neutral by 2030, with suppliers expected to meet minimum sustainability standards. Bentley’s global retailer network will be given the same targets, with all expected to be carbon neutral by 2025.

The brand expects plug-in hybrids, headed by the upcoming Flying Spur PHEV and current Bentayga PHEV, to form 20 per cent of its total sales in 2022. It has announced that there will be an additional five other PHEV variants, highly likely to be based on the current lineup of cars to be added to the lineup in the coming months.

What’s of real interest to customers is the brand’s Five-in-Five plan. Fellow British brand Jaguar is singing a similar tune of becoming entirely electric by 2030, and Bentley has stated that it is not "selling out", in that the brand will remain top-tier and exclusive, just transitioning to being entirely electric.

Matthias Rabe, Bentley’s head of engineering, states that beginning in 2025, the brand will introduce one entirely new EV a year for five years running, and that each model will be an all-new design developed from ground-up at its facilities in Crewe.

Whether this means that its traditional models like the Flying Spur and Continental GT are set to be replaced entirely or transitioned into new electric models is yet to be confirmed. There are no designs to show to the public yet, but the promise is that the new Bentley EVs will all be "exciting and unique".

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This article was first published in CarBuyer.