Bentley Is The Latest Manufacturer To Delay Its EV-Only Plans

The luxury manufacturer may push back its plans to go fully electric by a couple of years, while the Continental will get a plug-in hybrid V8 to replace the outgoing W12

Mike Bartholomew

Updated: 19 Mar 2024

This is starting to sound a bit familiar. Three years on from announcing that it planned to axe all of its internal combustion-powered cars by 2030, Bentley is the latest manufacturer to admit that that target may have been a little ambitious.

In a recent conference call, the British manufacturer’s chief executive officer Adrian Hallmark told journalists that the deadline may slip by a year or two, as reported by Road & Track. This isn’t quite as dramatic a U-turn as Mercedes-Benz, which originally gave the same 2030 deadline before backtracking on that to the extent that it now forecasts just half of its sales will be electric by then. Bentley, on the other hand, is still eyeing up an all-electric lineup by the early 2030s. Auto Express reports that technical issues are the reason for the slight delay.

Bentley has a further ambition that its range will be exclusively hybrid by 2026. Currently, its Bentayga SUV and Flying Spur saloon are both offered as V6 plug-in hybrids, while the Continental GT remains exclusively combustion-powered for now.

That’ll change later this year when, according to Auto Express, it’ll launch “high-performance” hybrid versions of both the Continental and Flying Spur. These models will supersede the current range-topping versions powered by the company’s long-serving 6.0-litre twin-turbo W12, which will end production in April 2024.

The new versions are likely to share a powertrain with the Porsche Panamera Turbo e-Hybrid, with which they also share the VW Group’s MSB platform. In its newest form, that car mates a 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 with a 140kW electric motor for a combined output of 671bhp, with a more powerful Turbo S version likely to follow.

The Bentayga, which sits on different chassis architecture, won’t receive the same powertrain, with the V6 remaining the sole hybrid option.

Bentley isn’t the first manufacturer to row back on its original all-electric deadline, and it probably won’t be the last: as EV take-up hasn’t been as rapid as some manufacturers predicted, and as various governments reconsider their plans to ban internal combustion, there are surely other manufacturers taking long, hard looks at the deadlines they originally set themselves to bin petrol and diesel.

The first full sentence spoken by an infant Mike was a review of the ride quality of a Volvo 850. It was “Daddy’s car goes bumpy-bump on a bumpy road,” so would probably need proofreading a bit, but it was a start.